[HN Gopher] Copilot edited an ad into my PR
___________________________________________________________________
Copilot edited an ad into my PR
Author : pavo-etc
Score : 1429 points
Date : 2026-03-30 04:04 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (notes.zachmanson.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (notes.zachmanson.com)
| nialse wrote:
| Microsoft injecting permanent ads in PRs? Has this been
| independently confirmed?
|
| Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
| longislandguido wrote:
| > Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
|
| I'm reminded of Jay Mohr's legendary take some years back on
| the creepy Carl's Jr. commercials:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJlYRS2Vqkw
| blitzar wrote:
| Todays independent confirmation is brought to you by Microsoft
| -- Empowering every person and every organization on the planet
| to achieve more.
| dinakernel wrote:
| Seriously? Dont they want their system to succeed? I cant think
| of a better way of alienating the target customer than this.
| daemin wrote:
| Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy.
|
| Presumably they used a free version of the LLM, therefore it is
| completely understandable that it inserted a snippet of text
| advertising its use into the output. I mean using a free email
| provider also adds a line of text to the end of every email
| advertising the service by default - "Sent from iPhone" etc.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| This comment is shockingly ableist.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Using a LLM to fix a spelling mistake is retardedly lazy._
|
| If you do it manually, sure.
|
| If you have an agent watching for code changes and
| automatically opening PRs for small fixes that don't need a
| human-in-the-loop except for approving the change, it's the
| opposite of lazy. It eliminately all those tedious 1 point
| stories and let's the team focus on higher value work that
| actually needs a person to think about it.
|
| Given time _all_ small changes will be done this way, and
| eventually there won 't be a person reviewing them.
| pabrams wrote:
| That scenario doesn't require any explicit "summoning", and
| if there's a human in the loop approving the change,
| certainly they can fix the typo themself.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill at
| all
|
| In fact I don't even use Ctrl + F anymore and instead just
| use Claude for all my searches
| onion2k wrote:
| _Sounds like a great use of energy and tokens, not overkill
| at all_
|
| As much as AI uses a lot of energy, having something that
| fixes issues in the background is very likely to be a net
| saving if you consider the number of users who fail to
| complete a task due to the bug and have to either wait in a
| broken state or retry later.
|
| It's _probably_ using less energy than a person fixing the
| issue too. That 's a guess though.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| sed fixes typos faster. The absurd part is watching devs burn
| prod tokens on glorifed autocorrect, wait through LLM lag for a
| spelling fix, and then act shocked when the output comes back
| as word salad with a coupon code glued to the end.
| hexasquid wrote:
| I'm so tired of what initially looks like a perfect normal
| communication between two people, only to find that some third
| party has inserted itself like a parasite to exploit and extract
| human attention. That's why I use our sponsor, nord vpn ...
| pants2 wrote:
| Was Raycast bought by GitHub or something? Why would it be
| advertising for Raycast?
|
| Brought to you by Wendy's.
| efreak wrote:
| Presumably you need to pay raycast once for a setup operation
| while you need to pay constantly for copilot. Why wouldn't you
| advertise for someone who makes you more money at the same time
| as advertising for yourself?
| WD-42 wrote:
| Why is copilot doing this? If they wanted to show ads couldn't
| they... just show ads? Or is GitHub such a house of cards at this
| point that editing pr descriptions is the only way without
| risking another 9 of downtime?
| oefrha wrote:
| If they show the ad on github.com, agents accessing the PR
| using (an outdated, ad-free version of) gh CLI won't see it. /s
|
| (That said I'm rather skeptical of this and would like to see
| more details of the process that produced this, and proof.)
|
| Edit: Just noticed this official GitHub blog post from last
| month advertising Raycast, making this story a lot more
| believable: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-17-assign-
| issues-to-co...
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It could simply be something in the Raycast integraton?
| oefrha wrote:
| I said it's more believable than GitHub randomly
| advertising a non-GitHub product (my initial read of the
| situation, which seemed highly unlikely).
| rob74 wrote:
| ...a non-GitHub _and non-Microsoft_ product.
| acka wrote:
| An originally macOS-only product, too.
|
| Also, the documentation on Github, linked to by the ad,
| shows only Mac keyboard shortcuts for operating Raycast.
| flogy wrote:
| Are we sure this actually is originating from MS Copilot
| itself? Technically I believe it would be possible to smuggle
| ads into PRs using prompt injection too.
| lionkor wrote:
| Yes https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+
| cop...
| politelemon wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
|
| I think this is a ray cast issue, looking at these links. It
| appears on gitlab too, which is enough for me.
| with wrote:
| Everyone is doing this now. Granted, on Codex / Claude Code, you
| can disable it, it's not the default to have it disabled. For
| some reason on Cursor, they keep shoving the "Made with Cursor"
| into my PR description despite me disabling attribution, which
| looks really stupid on a work PR.
|
| I'm so tired of all this BS. Why did this become normal? and how
| do we not read this as cheap advertising?
| annie511266728 wrote:
| I think people read it as cheap advertising because a PR isn't
| really the tool's output, it's team communication.
|
| A little "made with X" in your own draft is one thing. Putting
| branding into a PR your coworkers have to read is another.
| post_below wrote:
| Assuming this isn't a hoax, this seems like a huge, probably
| unintentional, mistake by MS.
|
| If they genuinely implemented something like this, whatever they
| made from new customers via ads couldn't possibly make up for the
| loss of good faith with developers and businesses.
|
| I suppose if it's real we'll see more reports soon, and maybe a
| mea culpa.
| altairprime wrote:
| That's a really tasteful Juno Mail footer implementation for a
| mistake. If the AI self-invented it on a lark, good job, but it
| reads very strongly like someone intended it.
| Andrex wrote:
| Oh God, Juno Mail, my first email host. Thanks for unlocking
| that memory.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| How could you implement something like this _by accident_?
| bigyabai wrote:
| LLMs aren't known for being super deterministic.
| mathieudombrock wrote:
| LLMs are determistic. Just like everything else computers
| are capable of doing.
|
| Commercial front-ends just hide the random seed parameters.
| kortilla wrote:
| Distributed float math is not deterministic without
| introducing total operations ordering and destroying
| performance
| jdiff wrote:
| It's not usefully deterministic in the way computers
| usually are. Sensitively identical input can still lead
| to wildly different outputs even if all randomness is
| crushed out.
| sheept wrote:
| One feasible scenario could be that they are working
| on/experimenting with ads, and it was put behind a feature
| flag, but for whatever reason it was inadvertently ignored
| chrismorgan wrote:
| That's not implementing it by accident, that's deliberate.
| In such a scenario perhaps the _deployment_ was a mistake,
| but if you don't write the malware in the first place, it
| can't _be_ deployed. (Probably. This _is_ LLM stuff we're
| talking about.)
|
| (Yes, this is malware. It's incontrovertibly adware, and
| although some will argue that not all adware is malware,
| this behaviour easily meets the requirements to be deemed
| malicious.)
|
| It is said, never point a gun at something you're not
| willing to shoot. Apply something similar here.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.
|
| _z_ Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on
| your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.
| eCa wrote:
| Vibe coding and copilot inserted the ad-code into _that_ PR?
|
| Is that the most charitable way?
| goodusername wrote:
| Yeah, would be good to have confirmation that this happened to
| others as well.
|
| But it really seems like an own goal if true.
| boredpudding wrote:
| Confirmation seems to be here: https://github.com/search?q=%2
| 2%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
| tossandthrow wrote:
| It is likely not a hoax and likely very intentional.
|
| If you look at the positioning, someone has definitely
| justified that this is benign and a reasonable place to have an
| ad added in.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find
| many hits.
| kdheiwns wrote:
| Whenever these things happen, it's always a "mistake",
| "accident", or "bug" when the outrage is beyond what they
| expect. If it's limited outrage, it's labeled as enhancing the
| user experience. And even if it's massive outrage, that
| "mistake" is added back in a year or two later and never
| removed.
| devsda wrote:
| I think someone should track the ratio of these mistakes/bugs
| that directly or indirectly benefitted MS vs those that
| costed them.
| padjo wrote:
| MS burning trust with people to do some stupid marketing is on
| the fewer assumptions side of Occam's razor.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| M$ doesn't think beyond quarters. They have a near monopoly, do
| you think they care about "good faith". Shithub is like
| Linkedin for programmers, you pretty much need it to work
| anywhere big
| idkwhatimdoing2 wrote:
| Its like microsoft wants to be google, except its very intrusive.
|
| time is money, save both. try ramp.
| pabrams wrote:
| Why are you "summoning copilot" to correct a typo?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I actually like that I don't have to leave Github to deal with
| various feedback, especially if I switched branches already to
| do other work.
| icar wrote:
| https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
| deredede wrote:
| GitHub (still) allows you to edit files directly in the
| browser without using AI.
| Andrex wrote:
| I've always wondered how many people know about this. As
| someone who had to persist on Chromebooks for a bit (
| _before Linux support_ ), it was a godsend for quick fixes.
| shafyy wrote:
| Because people using LLMs get lazy and can't event type normal
| text themselves anymore.
| GN0515 wrote:
| But... why?
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I think they want the free advertisement, like Apple with its
| "sent from iPhone" addendums. But "sent from iPhone" is sometimes
| useful, and significantly shorter. If they just left it at
| "edited with copilot" I think it would be tolerable
| silisili wrote:
| That's exactly where my mind went. It's zero percent more
| insulting to me than 'sent from my iPhone.'
|
| If you don't want copilot garbage in your PRs, maybe don't use
| copilot to create or edit them?
| winrid wrote:
| It already does that, too, with the co-author
| pavo-etc wrote:
| I would argue that is a net positive, it is valuable to know
| if a language model was involved enough to be committing
| itself.
| computomatic wrote:
| I don't think the issue is the sign-off so much as that an
| existing PR was edited. Claude Code signs off when creating PRs
| and nobody seems bothered. But it won't edit an existing PR,
| and it won't sign off if I simply ask it not too (which I've
| automated). Editing any PR it touches - including one authored
| by someone else - is downright rude.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems
| bothered
|
| Not only unbothered, but genuinely appreciative of the
| notification.
| sph wrote:
| > Claude Code signs off when creating PRs and nobody seems
| bothered
|
| That's a great feature. When I open a repo and I see most
| commits co-authored by Claude, I can quickly dismiss the
| entire project as slop.
| politelemon wrote:
| > But "sent from iPhone" is sometimes useful,
|
| No, it is still an advert, and not useful in the least.
| masswerk wrote:
| Back in the day, it _was_ useful, as in, "Expect awkward
| phrasing and unintended effects of autocorrection, because
| mobile device. This message doesn't necessarily reflect the
| intent of the sender." (Considerate users would/could edit
| the signature to something w/o a product name in it.)
| Nowadays, this is pretty much the norm and no explicit
| warning ist required anymore.
| Hizonner wrote:
| So an automatic "I am a lazy piece of shit and think my
| time and convenience are worth more than yours" warning? I
| guess that's useful.
| bbkane wrote:
| I always felt like it was "I prioritized a speedy
| response on my phone instead of an elegant response from
| my computer at a later time".
| masswerk wrote:
| As in, "I put it on you to better check and follow-up
| before acting on this..." ;-)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That just means the person sending the message didn't
| bother to proof read their message before sending. And you
| don't need to be on an iPhone to mistype a message.
|
| A simpler explanation was that it was a shameful advert
| injected into the end of people's emails.
| masswerk wrote:
| I guess, it was probably intended as the second one (it
| was also the default email signature, so advertising that
| feature, as well), but its usefulness was definitely in
| the implied warning.
|
| Mind that a written message used to be the gold standard
| for expressed intent, which changed quite radically with
| smartphones. (Historically, this development is probably
| an important prerequisite for the acceptability of LLM
| generated text, I guess.)
| dist-epoch wrote:
| When they added this it was extremely useful - it signaled
| that you could afford an iPhone. It was really easy to
| delete, yet people not only didn't, but they would go out of
| their way to respond from the iPhone just so that they could
| plausibly have this status symbol on their email.
| Drakim wrote:
| That is also an advert, just a personal one.
| supernes wrote:
| "Sent from iPhone" doesn't contain a call to action, and
| doesn't exalt the features of the product.
| ahoka wrote:
| It's still advertisement of the shittiest kind.
|
| Comment made using Mozilla Firefox.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| You misunderstood it's purpose:
|
| Sent from iPhone - desirable cool rich person
|
| Made using Mozilla Firefox - poor uncool nerd
| turtleyacht wrote:
| Do you drive by a billboard that reads Does
| advertising work? Just did!
|
| Raycast is an application launcher thing:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raycast_(software)
|
| Ray casting, however, is different:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting
| anshumankmr wrote:
| One more step closer to
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAM1rSObk4c
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| How long before the LLM makes sponsored decisions in the actual
| implementation?
|
| "It looks like the user wants to add a database, I've gone ahead
| and implemented the database using today's sponsor: MongoDB"
| tossandthrow wrote:
| Likely already happening.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| To be fair, Gemini did try to get me to buy some nucleo144s
| recently...
|
| (sure, I was working on something embedded, and asked for a
| recommendation, but it seemed quite intent that it wanted me
| to use that specific board)
| itomato wrote:
| "Our affiliate solution partner"
| martianlantern wrote:
| Why are they doing this?
| simonw wrote:
| Which Copilot was this? There are a bunch of different products
| that share that name now.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but this
| has to be their worst. Copilot is currently, a tool to review
| PRs on github, the new name for windows cortana, the new name
| for microsoft office, a new version of windows laptop/pc, a
| plugin for VS code that can use many models, and probably a
| number of other things. None of these products/features have
| any relation to each other.
|
| So if someone says they use Copilot that could mean anything
| from they use Word, to they use Claude in VS Code.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| It's probably a useful feature: if it's named copilot, assume
| it's slop and avoid it.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Microsoft has had a lot of naming blunders in the past but
| this has to be their worst.
|
| Nah I still rate "Windows App" the Windows App that lets you
| remotely access Windows Apps. I hate it to death, its like a
| black hole that sucks all meaning from conversations about
| it.
| ValentineC wrote:
| "Microsoft Remote Desktop" was such a good and distinct
| name. RIP.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| funny enough I have a page just for tracking this also
| https://notes.zachmanson.com/microsoft-product-names/
| napo wrote:
| I wonder if 1) the PR was created using Raycast and this is the
| model signing its PR, or 2) if there was some prompt injection
| done at some point.
|
| Either of these options would still be bad, but here the author
| suggests that it's just copilot that now just injects ads in its
| output.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| I don't know how Raycast could run on the GitHub servers, but a
| third option could be dataset poisoning. Hostile raycast
| advertising campaign
| Surac wrote:
| as a non native speaker here please explain the meaning of PR to
| me.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Pull request, which is a request to merge changes in a git
| repository.
|
| Or (not in this case) public relations , which is an interface
| with how the public views your product, service or company. In
| this case, copilot adding advertising into git pull requests is
| bad public relations for Microsoft, but the article author is
| referring to pull request as PR
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| It was only a matter of time.
|
| Sent by my iPhone using tapatalk
| khvirabyan wrote:
| Just thinking, could it be that your coworker used Raycast to
| spin up a codex to review and fix the typo on the PR? And that
| comment was added by Raycast?
| 1una wrote:
| Seems like it: https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-
| copilot-agent...
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Yes. The same message in GitLab:
| https://gitlab.tudelft.nl/thomasvermeule/GeneralAviationAirc...
| lexicality wrote:
| that's an imported PR, presumably from github. Note how the
| copilot comments come from the same user as the author, with
| an `imported` tag.
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| I stand corrected. GitHub team confirmed it's their Copilot
| ad.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Yes, it seems very unlikely this is Copilot rather than
| Raycast, short of some very unexpected weirdness. I cling to
| that hope, anyway.
| connorgurney wrote:
| Indeed. I can't see why Copilot would promote an unrelated
| third-party service...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's time to make some money with Copilot and one way to do
| that is with partnerships.
|
| GitHub's docs and blog make use of and feature Raycast, and
| I'm willing to bet that's the result of a partnership, and
| not because someone writing docs and blog posts happens to
| think Raycast is great and keeps bringing it up.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The same way Google advertisers other organisations
| products.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| If you click the Raycast link in one of these PRs it links
| to: https://gh.io/cca-raycast-docs
|
| So I think they're injecting this as a tip on using
| Copilot, that just happens to be their integration with
| Raycast.
|
| I have no idea what their actual partnership with Raycast
| looks like, maybe this is part of what they offered them?
| But it's not a traditional link to another product ad like
| it appears to be from Raycast being a link.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| I doubt it. I noticed a few of these comments too on our PR's.
| We did ask copilot for a review ton GitHub (we just add copilot
| as a reviewer) but not through Raycast.
| thombles wrote:
| Oof. Why can't it just do its one job? My interest level in
| trying these agents has gone from lukewarm to zero.
| criddell wrote:
| It is doing its one job.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Post the trajectory if this is real.
| gpvos wrote:
| What do you mean with trajectory? Also, a simple github search
| will show you many hits for the Raycast text, proving that this
| is quite real.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The path of reasoning the agent took that led it to generate
| the output. The GitHub search bits got posted after my
| comment, so while it is clearly real, it just seems injected
| by Raycast.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| This is real. I do not have access to the path of
| reasoning, this ran through the GitHub copilot app which
| does not grant you access to the chain of thought.
| 0123456789ABCDE wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
|
| will this shut you up?
| charcircuit wrote:
| This looks like an ad for only Raycast which does not appear to
| be affiliated with Microsoft or GitHub at all so blaming Copilot
| or GitHub here is not justified.
|
| Edit: The link in the promotion goes to
| https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/use-copilot-agent...
|
| Which does show that this is affiliated with GitHub unlike what I
| thought. There are no mentions of this string in a code
| repository on GitHub (including the Raycast copilot extention).
| anton-g wrote:
| Well, you are not alone:
| https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
| jruohonen wrote:
| Interesting indeed. I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will
| be there as a viable option. Anyone who remembers SourceForge?
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I believe Codeberg is the new hotness
| steve1977 wrote:
| It is, but Codeberg is only for free and open source
| projects.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| Check out https://codefloe.com for private repos hosted
| with Forgejo. It is also free and hosted in the EU.
| hvb2 wrote:
| Are you actually using this? Their status page seems to
| indicate that their main service is unhealthy for the
| past 6 days?
|
| https://status.codefloe.com/
|
| Unhealthy doesn't mean unusable but it sounded great
| until I checked that.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| I just started using it last week. So can't comment on
| the reliability yet.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| You are free to host your own instance for commercial
| software.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But that would be Forgejo and some other projects AFAIK,
| not Codeberg (which is basically a hosting service using
| these projects)
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Yeah sure, and I guess there's a market for that as a
| service - others have mentioned at least one instance of
| that.
| pelasaco wrote:
| until its not.
|
| Every company or entity changes over time. Codeberg is
| great, but with more people using it for free, without
| donating, and worse, more people abusing the service with
| some bs AI generate code, malware, etc, more expensive will
| get to keep it running.. for now they have money, but as
| e.V in Germany, you survive either from members or from
| donations.. So use Codeberg, but most important, support
| it!
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| https://docs.codeberg.org/improving-codeberg/donate/
| maxloh wrote:
| Codeberg is for FOSS repos only, and you need to submit an
| application before using their CI:
| https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-e.V./requests
| miki123211 wrote:
| In addition, they're doing some very shady stuff re:
| captchas and accessibility, most likely running some
| secret patches on their server that they're not
| publishing in their source tree.
| progval wrote:
| Can you be more specific?
| raincole wrote:
| A few decades? Its competitors are not magically immune to
| this kind of spam.
| jruohonen wrote:
| > Its competitors are not magically immune to this kind of
| spam.
|
| Sure; a platform is a platform is a platform. As for
| predictions, it is interesting to see whether self-hosting
| and smaller self-managed infrastructures will gain more
| traction again.
| Brosper wrote:
| It's baked in literally into every coding tutorial and is
| kind of industry standard, like JIRA. Maybe it's just an
| experiment at this moment.
| officialchicken wrote:
| I must have a really really outdated version of K+R C.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Fuck the industry standard. That is how industry standards
| change.
|
| By the way, most pre-industry-standard FOSS projects still
| have their own infrastructure. I do find it disappointing
| that Rust is on GitHub.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > kind of industry standard
|
| ...for now.
|
| > like JIRA
|
| is not an industry standard. It's a widely used software by
| some folks. I used it in the past, not using now, for
| example.
|
| > Maybe it's just an experiment at this moment.
|
| Does Microsoft understand objection and negative feedback
| to experiments? - No. - Remind me
| in three days.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Most larger orgs I worked for used Gitlab rather than
| Github.
|
| Anyway, the core value of Github has always been
| collaboration - this is where people were. If people go to
| other platforms, this core value dwindles. And switching
| platforms is not that difficult.
| KGunnerud wrote:
| Another step into ensh*ttification?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
| theturtletalks wrote:
| It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is our
| only hope against enshittification. Everything that is VC
| backed or publicly traded will become enshittified, it's
| just a matter of time. At least with open-source, you can
| fork it and remove the "features" or point your agent to it
| and have it write the feature in your tech stack.
|
| Hell, I just saw an amazing open-source alternative to
| Raycast[0] and just replaced it the other day.
|
| 0. https://github.com/ospfranco/sol
| jjav wrote:
| > It's becoming clearer and clearer that open-source is
| our only hope against enshittification. Everything that
| is VC backed or publicly traded will become enshittified,
| it's just a matter of time.
|
| Stallman was always right, after all.
| majewsky wrote:
| Well, about the free-software part, anyway.
| jwr wrote:
| > open-source is our only hope against enshittification.
| Everything that is VC backed or publicly traded will
| become enshittified
|
| Solo founder here. My business is not VC-backed nor
| publicly traded, and I specifically avoided taking
| investment so that I can make all the decisions.
|
| I avoid enshittification. This sometimes hurts revenue,
| but so be it. I wouldn't want to subject my users to
| anything I wouldn't like.
|
| So, open-source is _not_ the only hope. You can run a
| sustainable business without enshittification. The
| problem is money people. The moment money people (career
| managers, CFOs, etc) take over from product people, the
| business is on a downward path towards enshittification.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I believe you, it's just I've seen similar stories and
| the good-intentioned founder gets tired and eventually
| sells the business and the new owner ends up
| enshittifying the product. Not saying in the slightest it
| will happen to your company and I don't hold that against
| the founder. It's their prerogative after all.
|
| Even when I use proprietary software, I sleep easier at
| night knowing that open-source alternatives keep them
| honest in their approach and I have an out if things do
| change.
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| public/legislative demand for data portability is imho
| the movement that will help shift society from this cycle
|
| edit: oh, that and distributed authentication and
| distributed discovery
| sekai wrote:
| Just more Microslop, amazing...
| petcat wrote:
| > I wonder how long GitHub as a platform will be there as a
| viable option.
|
| It will be there for as long as you (and everyone else) keep
| using it.
| antonvs wrote:
| The desire for free stuff is one of the most effective
| psychological hacks there is.
|
| The large majority of the dystopian web, like Gmail,
| Facebook, etc. depend on that.
|
| People who avoid e.g. Github, Gmail, Facebook, Xitter, etc.
| out of concern for broader principles will always be minor
| outliers.
|
| Xitter is one of the best examples. Everyone knows it's
| compromised, owned by an dangerously antisocial person
| who's actively working at multiple levels to make the lives
| of everyone else on Earth worse, yet very few have stopped
| using it.
|
| The saying "There's no ethical consumption under
| capitalism" is far too weak. It should me more like, there
| are no ethics under capitalism.
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| It will be there as long as M$ still needs to train LLMs on
| human-made code.
| RALaBarge wrote:
| It will probably remain as a platform for a very long time.
| cess11 wrote:
| SourceForge is still chugging along. It hosts some prominent
| projects:
|
| https://sourceforge.net/directory/linux/
| mghackerlady wrote:
| It still exists. It's practically unusable without an
| adblocker (like slashdot) but the occasional old project is
| hosted there (particularly CDE. how the mighty have fallen)
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Sourcehut is pretty good if you're willing to pay the (very
| reasonable may I add) prices
| anton-g wrote:
| Looks like there's a comment added by Copilot before any of
| these "tips" as well, so pretty sure this originates from
| Copilot and not Raycast:
| https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+AGENT+TI...
| politelemon wrote:
| Child comments here indicates its from Ray cast, and the
| messaging appears on gitlab too.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570820
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can use Copilot with Gitlab
| jdiff wrote:
| This is a theory, not an indication, and it doesn't hold
| given https://github.com/search?q=%22START+COPILOT+CODING+A
| GENT+TI...
| mvkel wrote:
| What an absolute mess. It's like some dystopian future where a
| man is laying in a casket, nearly dead, and on the casket's
| ceiling, inches from his face, is a screen with an ad blaring
| to drink more Diet Fanta.
| oakpond wrote:
| I notice this kind of "Sent from iPhone"-type spam with other AI
| tools too. It's awful.
| ookblah wrote:
| maybe every PR should be run through 2 other llms so they just
| remove the ads of competitors (or i guess you'll end up with all
| 3) /s
| iomer wrote:
| crappy much. wow.
| raincole wrote:
| Is Raycast even a product of Microsoft? If not, are we witnessing
| the first large scale prompt injection abuse?
| vcryan wrote:
| I'm not a fan of LLM's injecting themselves into PR/commit
| content. If you use multiple models, basically whichever one is
| operating git gets all the credit. But, even if you wrote all the
| code yourself, and just submitted the PR with Claude Code (or
| whatever) it would attempt to take credit for the changes.
|
| I currently have rules in all of my skill files forbidding models
| from advertising themselves or taking credit.
| 0123456789ABCDE wrote:
| this can be disabled with a setting:
| https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-setting...
| gherkinnn wrote:
| Obnoxious ads in LLM output was my only 2026 prediction. But I
| expected OpenAI to get there first and wasn't sure whether the AI
| companies would first add traditional ad boxes or go straight for
| blighted responses.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Whatever the reason for the inclusion was here, the general
| problem is much bigger. People / companies / products can
| influence the direction of AI answers to put them in a better
| light and to be recommended more often. This isn't limited to
| just products even.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| If not on the surface, we're all deep down aware that an
| initial era of an advertising-free new technology is once again
| almost over.
|
| See you on neural links before "sponsored thoughts".
| bryanhogan wrote:
| It's already over, the problem is the missing transparency.
| With an LLM you have no idea what influenced the answer, and
| there is no good way to show it to the user.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| What does AI have to do with it?
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| Isn't this more of a Raycast issue (apparently an agentic ai
| service) instead of GH Copilot itself?
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Satya "please don't say slop" Nadella eat your heart out.
| Magnificent amounts of value are truly being added by this tech.
|
| I'll add: it doesnt really matter if this was the integration
| dumbly appending a message or the llm inserting the ad. Judging
| by the response to this submission, sneaky ad slop is now firmly
| inside the overton window, so for MS it doesn't make sense NOT to
| do it.
| upmostly wrote:
| Isn't this the same as
|
| "Sent from my iPhone"?
| logicallee wrote:
| Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem
| starkeeper wrote:
| This is off the hook negligence and abuse they are training ads
| in on purpose now and think it's cool. We are doomed until it is
| all open source and only open source.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Claude will add itself as a contributor to a PR, which I consider
| an ad.
| baliex wrote:
| To play devil's advocate^, wouldn't it be plagiarism if it
| didn't?
|
| ^I find that turn of phrase to be particularly pleasing in this
| context.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| No. Plagiarism applies to people, not tools.
| ben_w wrote:
| Everyone who studies linguistics will tell you the rules of
| language are descriptive not proscriptive.
|
| This means that people saying "plagiarism" of an LLM, means
| that LLMs are necessarily in the set of things that can do
| plagiarism, regardless of if those same people would ever
| say this about a spanner.
|
| And you can also think about it a different way: a book is
| a tool for storing and distributing information,
| photocopying it is still plagiarism when done without
| attribution. Likewise, taking the output of an LLM, which
| is a tool for generating text in response to a prompt,
| without attribution, is as much plagiarism as if it came
| from a book.
|
| IMO, what matters most is that a lot of people want to be
| aware of if/when some content came from an LLM vs. from a
| human. That makes attribution useful, which makes it
| important to get right. And that's still the case even if
| you still object to the specific word "plagiarism".
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I don't think your example works because in the book case
| there's a clear author whose ideas are being reproduced
| without permission. The LLM in your example is not the
| author but rather the printing press, and no one would
| argue that the printing press' ideas are being stolen
| because the press doesn't have any.
|
| If one want to argue that "not citing the LLM would be
| plagiarism" then we would have to find the _human_ at the
| end of the chain whose ideas are being reproduced, which
| would require LLMs to output "this idea was seen in the
| following training documents".
| etiennebausson wrote:
| No, it is a tool.
|
| My IDE doesn't pretend to be a cohauthor of my work, neither
| should an LLM.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'm not sure if "plagiarism" is the right word or not, but
| given that the output of an AI seems to be considered non-
| copyrightable*, and given also that a lot of people are
| very upset about generative AI being immoral**, I think
| it's important to identify which contributions are from the
| tools whose use may cause problems.
|
| * I am not a lawyer, I'm going by articles talking about
| this
|
| ** I think the phrases are "copyright washing" and
| "plagiarism machines", amongst others
| crvdgc wrote:
| People, we just solved the LLM watermarking problem.
| plastic041 wrote:
| This "ad" is not exactly new. Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip"
| rather than an ad. I don't know if Raycast team even knows about
| this.
|
| https://github.com/PlagueHO/plagueho.github.io/pull/24#issue...
| Copilot has been adding "(emoji) (tip)" thing since May 2025.
| GitHub copilot was released in May 2025, so basically it has had
| an ad since beginning.
|
| There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.
| https://github.com/search?q=%22%3C%21--+START+COPILOT+CODING...
|
| Here are some of them:
|
| https://github.com/johannesPP/FS-Calculator/pull/2
|
| > Connect Copilot coding agent with Jira, Azure Boards or Linear
| to delegate work to Copilot in one click without leaving your
| project management tool.
|
| https://github.com/sharthomas645-tech/HybridAI-Next-React-Vi...
|
| > Send tasks to Copilot coding agent from Slack and Teams to turn
| conversations into code. Copilot posts an update in your thread
| when it's finished.
|
| Looks like MS really want to "give tips" about their new
| integrations.
|
| edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except for
| MS.
| esperent wrote:
| Honestly, it being a "tip" or "ad" is exactly the same.
|
| What I mean is that even if I take that at face value and
| accept that it's _not_ an ad, and I can just about see from a
| certain level of corporate brainwashing how one could believe
| that, it 's _still_ completely unacceptable.
| lwhi wrote:
| Yep, the fact they're altering repo content with advertising
| is wholly unacceptable.
| ta8903 wrote:
| PRs aren't part of the repository (if you define repository
| to mean part of `git`'s internal working. It's part of
| GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft.
| mtndew4brkfst wrote:
| Small nit, but PR description bodies might wind up as
| part of a commit message verbatim, depending on repo
| settings and the merger's personal behavior. It's an easy
| outcome, the merger doesn't need to copy and paste or
| anything, and I think it might be a default or popular
| setting for squash-merges.
| skywhopper wrote:
| It's a spot that will easily be replaced with paid ads, for
| sure. Not sure why it wouldn't be better to just inject this
| sort of message into the UI instead of editing the PR text
| itself. (Except that the team implementing it probably
| couldn't get the UI team to agree.)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It's platform agnostic as long as your Copilot setup can
| create PRs on the platform your project is hosted on.
|
| Otherwise, it would just be Github with displayed ads and
| that would hurt the brand, so everyone gets ads.
| plastic041 wrote:
| I do think it's just an ad. Also it's a bad kind of one
| because 1) it disguises itself as a tip 2) makes people to
| think if it's an ad for Raycast or other services, when
| actually it's just promoting itself.
| ccozan wrote:
| if is paid by and for a 3rd party, is an ad. if not, is a
| tip.
| frereubu wrote:
| That's not a good distinction. If I see an advert for
| Microsoft 365 in the Start menu on Windows they're both
| from Microsoft but it's still an advert.
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| six of one, half dozen of the other; it may not be a
| payed advertisement but it functions as one if it's
| suggesting products.
|
| It's not like this is organic word of mouth we're dealing
| with here.
| plastic041 wrote:
| It still would be a self promoting, which is still an ad.
| frereubu wrote:
| Calling it a "tip" is definitely just a semantic trick to
| make it slightly less easy to frame a negative response and
| galvanise opinion against the practise. Reminds me a bit of
| confirmation shaming (which, now I think about it, I haven't
| seen in a while) where you're made to click a button that
| says something like "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my
| next order by signing up to your email list".
| plastic041 wrote:
| > semantic trick
|
| That's what I wanted to say! Thank you.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| >> you're made to click a button that says something like
| "No, I don't want an amazing 15% off my next order by
| signing up to your email list"
|
| Ugh, this type of thing is the worst. "Click here to remain
| fat, drunk and stupid!"*
|
| * Animal House, 1978
| wincy wrote:
| I was playing Mario Party Jamboree this weekend with my
| kids, and when you use a key to unlock doors (for anyone
| not familiar, Mario Party is a family friendly virtual
| board game with lots of minigames that's been around since
| the Nintendo 64) that serve as shortcuts in the game board,
| the key is alive and says "don't you want to keep being
| friends? You wouldn't use me on a door, would you?" Which
| is a humorous twist on confirmation shaming inside of the
| game and gives me a bit of enmity for the imaginary key.
|
| Conversely, on Doom Dark Ages they got rid of the
| traditional difficulty mode of "I'm too young to die" which
| had a picture of Doom Guy with a bib and a pacifier, I
| think there's some new industry guidance that it's a no no
| to poke fun at people picking easy difficulties, or even
| indicating what difficulty the game was "designed to be
| played on" which Japanese game devs happily ignore.
|
| I know these aren't actual equivalents since your money
| isn't used on the line and it's purely a game state, buts
| it's still an interesting and noteworthy transition.
| anthonyrstevens wrote:
| I this a similar thing? Apple web signin doesn't let you
| easily choose SMS 2FA; you have to click "I can't get to my
| devices right now" first before you can send yourself a
| text message. I always resent them for making me lie,
| because although my devices ARE nearby (ish), my phone is
| always, like RIGHT THERE.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| It's an interesting model, makes me wonder if prolific open
| source contributors do it ("leave a tip if you like this MR"
| kind of thing).
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Microsoft would probably seriously refer to it as 'just the
| tip'.
|
| You'll never guess what happens next.
|
| (Hint: everyone knows what happens next)
| stingraycharles wrote:
| AI clippy?
| consp wrote:
| Leave the poor fellow alone. It's been butchered enough in
| the late 90s and early 00s, and has been repurposed for a
| greater good. I'd argue not all Microsoft creates is bad,
| it just needs someone else to make it better.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Microslop for a while now seems to be testing exactly how much
| you can abuse the user before they move somewhere else. Windows
| is a prime example. Everything is ads, tracking, popups,
| annoyances, etc.
|
| They have got away with it for a while because a lot of users
| have largely been stuck, but they are in real trouble now with
| Apple providing meaningful competition.
| transcriptase wrote:
| Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a
| seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they're ready to
| start listening to feedback and...
|
| * checks notes *
|
| Only have copilot shoehorned into most things instead of
| everything. And some shit about windows developers which
| isn't exactly going to fix the glaring issues with the OS
| itself.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Yeah but at least a dozen Microsoft employees went on a
| seemingly scripted blitz on X about how they're ready to
| start listening to feedback and..._
|
| So what was the purpose of all that telemetry they
| collected then? Because it doesn't seem to have made the OS
| like what the users want it to be.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| To better target ads.
| mulmen wrote:
| Data Gnomes
|
| 1) collect data
|
| 2) ???
|
| 3) profit
| TheScaryOne wrote:
| Do you hate the "Ribbon" UI that got forced into
| everything in Win8+?
|
| That's what telemetry was used for. Every advanced user
| turned that off when they gave us the option, and now we
| have every UI on the computer designed for Grandma.
| philwelch wrote:
| It's because of the way companies align their own behavior.
| "Listening to feedback" is just a good intention but
| increasing engagement with copilot is a measurable goal.
| With apologies to George Orwell, imagine an OKR stamping on
| a human face--forever.
| polski-g wrote:
| They literally broke 40yr standard keyboard layouts on
| laptops by replacing right alt buttons with their bullshit
| AI button.
|
| Are they going to fix hardware they've already sold? On
| every OEM?
| gloosx wrote:
| Microsoft can show a screen-wide dick enlarger ad instead of
| everyone's wallpaper and people will still be using windows
| for decades. They already know it.
| oefrha wrote:
| > There are 1.5m of these things in GitHub.
|
| You're pointing to something entirely different: those are
| Copilot-created PRs. They can include anything Copilot wants to
| include. People using the Copilot PR feature know what they're
| buying into.
|
| OP is about Copilot doing post-hoc editing of a human-created
| PR to include an ad, allegedly without knowledge or approval of
| the creator (well I assume they did give their team member
| permission to update the PR body, but apparently not for this
| kind of crap).
| plastic041 wrote:
| I wanted to say that they are same because they are "copilot-
| written self promotions", but I get your point.
|
| Also I found this: https://github.com/Laravel-
| Backpack/medialibrary-uploaders/p... it seems like copilot
| added an ad on behalf of the user at Nov 2025(see last edit).
| red_admiral wrote:
| > Looks like MS really want to "give tips"
|
| Including Windows, File Explorer, Start Menu, ...
|
| It seems with the latest "ok we went too far" Win11 patch
| though, they got some tips back from their users.
| ttyyzz wrote:
| It is clearly an ad, no doubt about that.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| It's definitely an ad, I think the only real question is
| whether it's just marketing Copilot or whether part of their
| partnership with other companies is advertising the integration
| in this way. The links all go to Copilot docs pages on the
| integrations, so they're not typical tracked link advertising
| campaigns.
| rubyfan wrote:
| It's like how Disney Plus "ad free" tier shows you ads for Hulu
| and Disney Perks. They probably redefine "ad" in their terms of
| service so their own ads are called something else.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Yeah it's just helpful tips and suggestions. It's a feature,
| you see!
| MereInterest wrote:
| I looked into it at one point, as I was disgusted by the
| unskippable advertisements when paying for an ad-free tier on
| one of the myriad streaming platforms. Apparently, they
| distinguish between "advertisements" for a product or service
| and "promotions" for themselves. I get why that would be a
| reasonable internal distinction, as the former would require
| sign-off from the business paying for the advertisement,
| while the latter would only need internal approval, but it's
| a pointless distinction after that.
| antonvs wrote:
| > Looks like MS thinks it's a "tip" rather than an ad.
|
| No, they don't.
|
| > edit: I think it's an ad too. Everyone would think so, except
| for MS.
|
| You think a company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an
| army of marketing professionals doesn't realize that what
| they're doing here is an ad, and didn't implement it
| intentionally as such?
|
| That's not even remotely plausible. In the quantum multiverse
| which contains all physically realizable possibilities, that
| isn't one of them.
| plastic041 wrote:
| > company with a $2.65 trillion market cap and an army of
| marketing professionals
|
| That's one reason I think they would argue it's not an ad.
| Another reasons are "recommendations" and "tips" and
| "suggestions" in my windows.
| antonvs wrote:
| They might _argue_ it 's not an ad but they don't _believe_
| or think it 's not an ad. There's a big difference.
| kivle wrote:
| A bit like "suggested apps" in the start menu. It's
| "suggestions" and certainly not paid ads.
| nathanaldensr wrote:
| It's gaslighting on a worldwide scale is what it is.
| Yizahi wrote:
| This tip/ad discussion reminds me of the equally idiotic and
| misleading Facebook post types. Instead of the correctly
| labeling all ads as, well, ads, Facebook have some ads called
| "suggested for you", some are completely unlabeled with only a
| "follow" button to start following, some ads are labeled as
| "sponsored" etc. I think they are doing this to evade legal
| limitations they might have otherwise. Last time I used
| Facebook it showed me 25 ads in a row (I counted), without any
| of my hundreds of follows with active feeds. Truly insane
| company.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| If Microsoft is willing to put ads into your PRs via Copilot
| like this, imagine what they could put into your codebase
| itself with Copilot.
|
| Or what Microsoft could do, run, install, etc on/from your
| computer while running their Copilot agents.
|
| This is the same company that puts ads in your start menu and
| reinserts them with Windows updates even if you manually
| removed them.
| neya wrote:
| Imagine just having the copilot extension installed will be
| an excuse at some point for them to steal our code to train
| their AI models. Not sure if they already do this.
| justinclift wrote:
| "at some point"?
|
| Why the assumption it's not already happening?
| neya wrote:
| > Not sure if they already do this.
| NateEag wrote:
| Of course they already do this.
|
| The ToS (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
| copilot/for-indivi...) says explicitly:
|
| > Copilot may include both automated and manual (human)
| processing of data. You shouldn't share any information
| with Copilot that you don't want us to review.
|
| so they're reserving the right to process whatever it looks
| at.
|
| You're sending them your codebase already, as part of the
| prompt for generating new snippets, debugging, etc. So they
| have access to it.
|
| They'd be absolute fools not to be using the results of
| sessions to continue to refine their models, and they
| already reserved the rights to look at what you send them,
| so yeah - they're doing it.
|
| (Bonus comedy from the ToS:
|
| > Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
|
| The lawyers know these things cannot be trusted.)
| neya wrote:
| > Copilot is for entertainment purposes only.
|
| Jokes on them, that's why I consider entire Microsoft for
| entertainment purposes only.
| circuit10 wrote:
| Also for some reason that site hijacks your scrolling and
| tries to "smooth" it, which just makes it feel more
| unresponsive as most browsers already have smooth
| scrolling?
|
| Looks like they're using this:
| https://github.com/gblazex/smoothscroll-for-websites
|
| I know it's a bit off topic but I'm just confused as to
| why that would be on there...
| henry2023 wrote:
| I wonder if there will come a time where I can pay M$ to
| sabotage my competition codebase
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| If they're using Copilot, you're already most of the way
| there.
| degrees57 wrote:
| You have to get acquired by Microsoft first.
| sehansen wrote:
| "Reflections on Trusting Trust" for the new era. MSVC doesn't
| compile a secret master-password into your software, just a
| Copilot ad.
|
| ("Reflections on Trusting Trust" Turing Award Lecture by Ken
| Thompson: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson
| _1984_Ref...)
| le-mark wrote:
| +1000 Everyone in technology should read this.
| aiedwardyi wrote:
| This is the core issue. These tools operate with very little
| transparency about what they're doing under the hood. Even
| basic stuff like how much of your session resources have been
| consumed is hidden from you in most tools.
| nulltrace wrote:
| Spent yesterday pruning dependencies in a project. Cut half
| of them and everything still worked. Makes you wonder how
| much stuff we pull in without thinking about it. Same thing
| with AI-generated PRs honestly, one bad suggestion and it
| ships.
| mathieudutour wrote:
| > I don't know if Raycast team even knows about this.
|
| I'm part of Raycast, we didn't know about it, learnt about it
| here
| tyleo wrote:
| I haven't clicked through so all I know about Raycast is,
| "that's the company that gets shoved into ads by copilot."
|
| Sounds like it's not your fault but it's probably doing some
| brand damage :/
| delfinom wrote:
| They should probably get a lawyer to send a C&D.
| buildbot wrote:
| There's like 100 comments blaming raycast, they should
| just sue for damages lol.
| grayhatter wrote:
| Had I not seen this thread, I would have assumed they
| consented to it, and I'd never willingly interact with
| Raycast or it's team in any way. I still have a somewhat
| negative opinion, so I think it's safe to say there are
| damages.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| As a data point, I consent to be counted as associating
| raycast with the Microsoft brand and viewing them
| negatively as a consequence of using pull requests as an
| advertising canvas.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| I hear you, but honestly it's kind of funny to think a
| company would send C&D to stop free advertising for them.
| I'd be surprising to see if any company ever does that,
| whatever the people think small brands worth they
| actually worth way less than that.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Is it free advertising or free brand damage? (people
| might think that raycast had consented to this)
|
| but as we know from this thread, Raycast didn't consent
| to this.
|
| It might be interesting to see what a lawyer might think
| of this and if there are enough reasonable claims to
| genuinely sue for damages
|
| (Raycast definitely seek a lawyer privately, just in
| case)
| jarek83 wrote:
| Maybe check if you are charged for it
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| If it's Microsoft related, might be something in your
| Partner Center.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Creepy. Looks like they rolled it back:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47573233
|
| Collection of my thoughts which don't really get to a point:
|
| - Microsoft owns GitHub, where Raycast is being mentioned
| thousands of times by their tooling.
|
| - Microsoft is a modern popularizer of the infamous phrase,
| embrace extend extinguish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embr
| ace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| - Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
|
| - From an empathetic perspective I hope for the sake of the
| customers of raycast and for its employees that Microsoft is
| not into any kind of negotiations with Raycast at the moment.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _Microsoft has a history of monopoly behavior_
|
| I just want to note that the case you link to was 25 years
| ago. The number of people working at Microsoft at the time
| who are still working there today is very small.
| burkaman wrote:
| One of those people is the CEO though.
| rchaud wrote:
| The Microsoft that was prosecuted for monopoly behaviour
| 25 years ago is definitely not the same Microsoft that
| owns:
|
| - Github
|
| - LinkedIn
|
| - Activision Blizzard
|
| - Xbox
|
| - Azure, Sharepoint and Teams w/Copilot embedded
| everywhere
|
| - major stake in OpenAI
|
| - a multibillion dollar ad product portfolio (LinkedIn
| ads, Bing Ads)
| TheScaryOne wrote:
| After being told to not integrate Internet Explorer into
| the OS, they changed the name to EDGE and did it anyway?
| With the added excuse that it now compromises most of the
| file explorer functionality, too?
| QuantumGood wrote:
| > _" history .. 25 years ago"_
|
| The comment was brief, and added detail is welcome, but
| corporate mission/culture often extends over time even
| with changes in leadership. Partly because of what was
| accepted in the past.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| New age clippy no one wants but M$lop
| m3kw9 wrote:
| You just text replaced Ad with Tip, it's still an ad
| josefritzishere wrote:
| This does not look like random chance. It's a pattern of
| behavior.
| mememememememo wrote:
| I miss the good old days whem there were "hire me" ads in NPM
| installs.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Decision time, Western man: will you let the "tehe, just a
| miwtake xsxd UwU" slide or will you do something about? This is
| just a first pebble.
| simonjgreen wrote:
| So does Claude, Codex, and Cursor. Albeit more subtle, but they
| are hardly shy about it
| bfivyvysj wrote:
| You can disable it. It's annoying wf.
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| I was recently running Copilot CLI in a sandbox on autopilot mode
| and it kept overriding git config to put only "GitHub Copilot" as
| commit author instead of my name. Strongly worded instructions
| weren't helping, I had to resort to the permission system to
| change this behavior.
|
| I wonder if this is consistent with their terms of service. I
| mean, maybe they DO take all the responsibility for the code I
| generate and push in this manner?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| It's possible they are safeguarding for possible future changes
| of copyright law that would give Microsoft copyright over all
| Copilot contributions. This may sound paranoid but, as far as I
| know, exactly who counts as an "AI operator", how much
| authorship an "AI operator" has, and who gets copyright, or
| whether AI contributions are even in the public domain, are
| legally untested and unclear issues.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The US Copyright Office has said that AI output from human
| prompting is not copyrightable. There are caveats, but
| iterating on prompts results in output that's nobody's IP.
|
| Because it's nobody's IP, Microsoft is already in a position
| where they could just use, remix and/or distribute that
| output however they want to today.
| logicprog wrote:
| This is a wild misinterpretation of that ruling.
| Grimblewald wrote:
| tough luck for MS or other "AI" providers claiming any
| ownership, since if they can claim ownership, then it opens
| up the discussion of what license the AI output really is
| under, since it was trained on GPL licensed data.
| LtWorf wrote:
| No it's just that those commits aren't copyrightable and they
| probably want to reuse them in the future.
| danielsamuels wrote:
| It's a setting that causes an extra prompt to be placed into
| the system prompt.
| shevy-java wrote:
| I have a somewhat similar problem with github issue templates.
| They automatically stuff I don't care about or would propose and
| structure things in ways I don't like. Granted, I can edited this
| away, but it requires extra time and makes filing issues more
| work than before. Biggest case in point is the "I will adhere to
| the Code of Conduct". In general I do not care about CoCs and it
| is fascinating how CoCs leak into everywhere for some so-called
| "open source" projects. They don't seem to understand the issue
| when the licence does not require a CoC; even then the issue is
| not about the CoC in and by itself (though I also find them
| pointless), but that extra content is automatically added to
| issue templates in general, CoCs just being one of many spam-
| options. And I also recall some donation-ads that are
| automatically added too - I have no problem when projects request
| financial support, but if I file an issue then the issue is about
| the content of the issue, not about anything else.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| A little bit off topic but our company recently enforced
| Microsoft Authenticator for account login. Which I was mildly
| annoyed about but now I'm super pissed off because they have
| started abusing the notification permission granted to allow
| authenticator to work to push out ads for Microsoft 365. It feels
| like we've gone back to 90s Microsoft when everyone hated them.
| andai wrote:
| Man, what is the world coming to?
|
| -Sent from my iPhone
| caijia wrote:
| I've already be patient when claude code always signs my commits
| as co-author by defualt. Yes, it is.
|
| But I'm also paying the plan. Theres something odd about a tool
| which i paid for using my output to AD itself.
| 6510 wrote:
| I don't see an ad, I see a warning. I like it.
| croes wrote:
| Sent-from-my-iPhone 2.0
| dathinab wrote:
| This is unsolicited advertisement impersonating the developer
| (yes people can guess, but this still places it inside a message
| of the developer and in difference to e.g. mail programs doing it
| it's not placing it in the draft),
|
| I don't see how this is supposed to be legal.
| hedora wrote:
| Demand it be made illegal. Vote, especially during primaries,
| and almost never for an incumbent.
| gpm wrote:
| I strongly suspect that this is already illegal - publicity
| rights are a thing - and the the demand that needs to be made
| is for the law to be enforced.
| volkadav wrote:
| On the bright side, at least it's in the PR text and not the
| code? (... yet?)
|
| Sheesh.
| neya wrote:
| I feel like there is an even more important crisis that is being
| masked over here:
|
| https://github.blog/changelog/2026-03-25-updates-to-our-priv...
| New Section J -- AI features, training, and your data: We've
| added a dedicated section that brings all AI-related terms
| together in one place. Unless you opt out, you grant GitHub and
| our affiliates a license to collect and use your inputs (e.g.,
| prompts and code context) and outputs (e.g., suggestions) to
| develop, train, and improve AI models.
|
| We should not be using Copilot in the first place.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini all do
| this.
| cromulent wrote:
| Regarding Claude: As I have unticked the "Help improve
| Claude" checkbox, I was under the impression that Claude did
| not do this.
|
| https://privacy.claude.com/en/articles/10023555-how-do-
| you-u...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| You can opt out with all three (Codex, Claude, Copilot)
| except for Gemini
| lostmsu wrote:
| Last time I checked Codex didn't have that option for $20
| plan
| neya wrote:
| > except for Gemini
|
| This is incorrect. If you are a paid subscriber, Gemini
| explicitly states it doesn't use your data to train its
| models.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yeah you're right, I filed it away as no opt out for some
| reason
| hedora wrote:
| Maybe because Google "does not sell" personal
| information, yet almost all their revenue comes from
| personal information?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| They sell aggregated information.
| hedora wrote:
| And targeted information.
| neya wrote:
| > OpenAI/ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic/Claude and Google/Gemini
| all do this.
|
| 1. Everyone doing this doesn't mean it's acceptable.
|
| 2. Google Gemini explicitly says right under the chat box if
| you are a paid subscriber (Workspace):
| Your <company name> chats aren't used to improve our models.
| Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.
|
| Not sure about the others.
| g947o wrote:
| I think anyone using a "Team" or enterprise plan of
| ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot doesn't have their data used for
| training, that's the same across the board.
| chimpanzee2 wrote:
| Looks like you can disable it though:
|
| https://github.com/settings/copilot/features
|
| -> Privacy -> "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model
| training"
| neya wrote:
| Yeah, but it's a shitty move though - it should be by default
| opt-in, rather than opt-out. Imagine, you just continue
| coding normally consciously avoiding co-pilot only to find
| out that Github has been secretly training their models on
| your code, just because you forgot to toggle a setting off
| which was turned on without your knowledge, which they didn't
| even have the decency to email you about, but just posted on
| a blog no one reads.
| saintfire wrote:
| I got an email about it.
|
| Its sort of a moot point since the whole thing is for good
| will anyways.
|
| They freely scraped licensed code and semi-private data
| across the internet and now they're pretending that they
| need to license anything.
|
| If a court rules they had to license data in the first
| place then the whole industry would actually have to start
| following laws.
| dekoidal wrote:
| After hiring the brightest minds on the planet for years, the
| best these companies can think of is more ads.
| Luker88 wrote:
| outrageous!
|
| --
|
| Sent from my Android phone
|
| --
|
| Sent from my iPhone
|
| Self-advertisement has been creeping up on us on a lot of places,
| I am unfortunately pessimistic on how this will turn out
| Andrex wrote:
| You could argue this is in keeping with consumer trends,
| unfortunately.
|
| "Endorsing products is the American way to express
| individuality."
|
| Calvin noticed it 30+ years ago.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What on earth is going on with that awful header moving around
| the page?
| g105b wrote:
| Hopefully it is just copilot that is dying and not GitHub itself.
| impish9208 wrote:
| Next up: watch a 30-second unskippable video ad to see your CI
| error logs!
| cmiles8 wrote:
| As companies get more and more desperate to show profitable use
| of AI expect more and more of these Hail Mary attempts to get
| traction.
|
| The runway on free cash to fund the current bonanza is running
| out and crunch time is near.
| aeon_ai wrote:
| At this point, Microsoft has lost all trust anyone might have had
| for them or their products.
|
| Now is the time to move to Linux, and vibe code whatever niceties
| are keeping you on GitHub.
| tyleo wrote:
| It's even worse than the title says. As some other comments point
| out, this is in millions of repositories across GitHub.
|
| More like, "Copilot edits ads into PRs."
|
| The title almost makes it sound like it could be a single
| fluke/one bad prompt but it's really enshitification at massive
| scale.
|
| https://github.com/search?q=%22%E2%9A%A1+Quickly+spin+up+cop...
| santiago-pl wrote:
| It reminds me of Anthropic's Super Bowl ad: "Can I get a six pack
| quickly?" It actually turned out to be true.
| timrogers wrote:
| Tim from the Copilot coding agent team here. We've now disabled
| these tips in pull requests created by or touched by Copilot, so
| you won't see this happen again for future PRs.
|
| We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot
| coding agent. The goal was to help developers learn new ways to
| use the agent in their workflow. But hearing the feedback here,
| and on reflection, this was the wrong judgement call. We won't do
| something like this again.
| tyleo wrote:
| I'm curious how the decision to include ads like this was made.
| Is that something you can share?
| shimman wrote:
| [flagged]
| ncr100 wrote:
| MS was deemed a Monopoly I believe around '99 and was not
| broken up, was instead given behavioral edicts by the
| court.
|
| Microsoft owns GitHub where many of these ethical
| violations are easily found and were perpetrated.
|
| I speculate the cultural safety around that monopoly-power
| for corporate-benefit behavior could still be present and
| accepted for negotiations between MS and acquisition
| targets.
| poszlem wrote:
| Shockingly poor judgment.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| "We won't do something like this again"
|
| A verifiable claim! I put it at 75% you totally will, but if
| any manifolders think I'm full of it it should converge to
| something less cynical
|
| https://manifold.markets/HastingsGreer/will-microsoft-copilo...
| malfist wrote:
| I mean its microslop, it'll probably be back by the end of
| the week. They only know how to let people to say "yes" or
| "ask again later"
| semiquaver wrote:
| Don't worry, some alternate interpretation of the words "we",
| "do", or "like this" will allow a welch.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| > A verifiable claim!
|
| Once you put a deadline on it. As stated I don't think it is.
| jffry wrote:
| > We've been including product tips in PRs created by Copilot
| coding agent
|
| If the PR is wholly authored by Copilot I get the spirit of
| this, although maybe not the best implementation. And "tips"
| like this that look like an ad for a product _definitely_ feel
| like an enshittification betrayal of the user, even if it was a
| genuine recommendation and not a paid advertisement.
|
| In the OP's situation, where where Copilot was summoned to fix
| some thing within a human-authored PR, irrelevant modification
| of the PR description to insert unrelated content is
| specifically egregious. Copilot can easily include the tip in
| its own comment, so I'm curious why it was decided to edit the
| description of a PR instead.
| plasma wrote:
| To be honest, just a user here, it's only recently (like a
| week?) you can ask Copilot to edit an existing PR,
| historically it's had to open a new one (that merged back to
| original PR) or it had to make it to begin with, I can see
| this unintentionally happening as part of this improvement to
| edit existing PRs
| skywhopper wrote:
| Nah, PR text is a _completely inappropriate_ place for a tip
| to appear. A PR description should describe the contents of
| the PR, not include unrelated, unsolicited advice. It'd be
| like submitting a bug fix, and saying "this PR fixes bug X,
| and also, have you considered using a different linter in
| this project?" Completely inappropriate.
| buildbot wrote:
| [flagged]
| martinwoodward wrote:
| We are not training on the contents of private repos, but we
| do plan on training on usage data with Copilot unless you opt
| out before April 24. Details here: https://github.blog/news-
| insights/company-news/updates-to-gi...
|
| That post has a link to the FAQ which might also be helpful:
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188488
| coldpie wrote:
| > We are not training on the contents of private repos
|
| Supremely ethical of you to ignore the license terms of
| open source code, but respect the license for proprietary
| code.
| voganmother42 wrote:
| Opt out is horse shit
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| What am I supposed to opt out of? The only setting in
| "Privacy" is "Suggestions matching public code" which is
| blocked and seems wholly unrelated to this.
| ncr100 wrote:
| This too is creepy.
|
| The behavioral impositions by the court in the United
| States versus Microsoft trial discourage it from Monopoly
| behavior by opening third-party apis to competitors.
|
| Q: Will Microsoft share its access to users private repos
| where they have not opted out of this training via its
| GitHub subsidiary, with third parties (eg OpenAI and
| Anthropic), in the spirit of its loss to the United States
| during its trial for Monopoly behavior?
|
| Eg ethically today, Microsoft may be able to be argued to
| be monopolizing user data for its own AI tooling advantage.
| chaps wrote:
| How much has Microsoft paid you to sell your soul?
| buildbot wrote:
| Yes or No: Hypothetically I put customer data in a private
| repo, a single file. I use copilot to analyze the file,
| submitting its contents to that backend. This is the only
| thing in the repo. Is that data collected and trained on?
| If the answer is not no, you are lying about what this opt
| in is.
| hightrix wrote:
| Opt out is the same as forcing this on people that don't
| want it. You know this.
|
| Microslop proving their name time and time again.
| ulbu wrote:
| why not make it opt-in?
|
| and I wonder if this opt-out applies to data we stored
| under your umbrella before having opted-out.
| pesus wrote:
| Why such strong opposition to getting user consent before
| doing any of this? Not respecting consent seems to be a
| very common theme with MS these days, and it really doesn't
| reflect well on the company or you personally.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Bypassing consent has been a very pervasive theme in tech
| and beyond this decade.
| microtonal wrote:
| IANAL I wonder how that is legal in the EU, at least for
| private individuals, since under the GDPR you need consent
| for collecting such data. (A timed opt-out is not consent.)
| tyleo wrote:
| I've felt similarly about moving off GitHub. I bought a small
| 5U server rack years ago for my home network setup.
|
| I'm considering getting a 1U device to host my own git
| server. I feel like if I move off, I should do it generally
| vs just moving to another provider who may also pull
| shenanigans.
| justinclift wrote:
| For low-resource usage, Forgejo has a good reputation:
| https://forgejo.org
|
| ie you can run it effectively on even a Raspberry Pi
|
| Remember to ensure you have proper backups regardless of
| whatever you decide to host it on. :)
| monegator wrote:
| i had a gitea instance in a beaglebone black! Self
| hosting can have really low requirements (now it's a much
| beefier banana pi R3 router, but there are many
| containers running on it)
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _It's rather bold to post here..._
|
| it is rather nice, honestly. would you prefer to scream into
| the void and not get any response at all?
|
| an open line of communication with the responsible people
| seems like literally the best possible option, why are you
| actively discouraging it?
|
| > _Maybe you all want to talk to Microsoft PR /legal before
| posting?_
|
| you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad
| legalese that doesnt mean anything? how exactly would that be
| better?
| buildbot wrote:
| I'm not intentionally discouraging it.
|
| The responses are affecting my impression of Microsoft and
| Github extremely negatively. I don't think I am alone.
|
| It's already pretty word salad legalese in my opinion, at
| least from Github.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >would you prefer to scream into the void and not get any
| response at all?
|
| At this point, yes. What has false platitudes done except
| cause more in-fighting?
|
| >an open line of communication with the responsible people
|
| And here's how the in-fighting begins. I'm not falling for
| the "they responded on social media. They're just like us!"
| anymore.
|
| I don't want words, I want actions. Tired of playing whack
| a mole.
|
| >you would rather not hear anything, or get word-salad
| legalese that doesnt mean anything?
|
| Hearing nothing doesn't waste my time.
| john_strinlai wrote:
| > _Hearing nothing doesn 't waste my time._
|
| if not wasting time is your goal, several layers deep
| into the comments of a hackernews post is probably not
| the correct place to be.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Perhaps. But I still do find insight in seeing the vibes
| of the community. Not as much from corporate PR.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't attack people for showing up to engage in
| discussion like this. I'm sure you don't intend to, but it
| quickly becomes part of mob behavior. We don't want that on
| HN for obvious reasons, and I'm sure nobody intends it,
| exactly, but it happens all too easily anyhow.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| buildbot wrote:
| Absolutely my bad it came across like this.
| dang wrote:
| I appreciate the reply. As mentioned, it happens
| unintentionally. One way to describe the (desired) HN
| community is everyone learning together how to avoid
| unintended effects.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > everyone learning together how to avoid unintended
| effects.
|
| Okay, but when will Microsoft?
|
| Or is it a more charitable interpretation to suggest they
| did intend this to be the effect?
| dang wrote:
| No, I wouldn't argue that. The point is we need to do
| this for ourselves, regardless of what some company or
| other group of people do.
| mghackerlady wrote:
| For some reason I don't believe you. When you do things like
| this, you lose trust. Work to get it back
| markkitti wrote:
| Thank you for listening.
| justinclift wrote:
| > We won't do something like this again.
|
| Microsoft has been pulling user hostile crap for decades, so
| either "we" or "like this" (or both) is probably not super
| accurate. ;)
| vdfs wrote:
| We will never do something like this unless we get caught
| namrog84 wrote:
| Having worked in such environments. This particular team will
| try not to do it again But many other teams didn't make the
| commitment or learn any lesson. And even the original team
| will churn over people and people will forget or new
| leadership comes in.
|
| I believe they were being sincere but reality is often more
| complicated than 1 persons statement.
| instakill wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576084 and
| please don't post so aggressively. I'm sure you don't intend
| to, but it has a strong negative effect on HN threads, and
| we're trying for something different here.
|
| You may not feel you owe $BigCoEmployee better (though
| chances are, said person is just as much a community member
| here as you and the other users slamming them are), but you
| owe this community better if you're participating in it.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| wswope wrote:
| GP did not personally attack or denigrate the person they
| were replying to.
|
| As the dozens of other comments show, the overwhelming
| majority of us do not believe the root commentors claims,
| and this PM quite objectively does not have the leverage
| and authority to back their claim that they won't let this
| happen again.
|
| It's hard not to read your conception of "trying for
| something different" as granting undue credulity to a
| transparently dishonest corporate actor.
| dang wrote:
| I understand, and I don't want to see ads in such
| contexts either. But "nobody believes this" is of course
| a personal attack, and "you don't have the power to [do
| what you just said you will do]" is pretty aggressive
| too.
|
| The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a
| "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and
| human. I feel it also, and in fact my first response when
| I read such comments is always an adrenaline surge and
| the peculiar pleasure-hit of righteous indignation. So
| yes, I know where these feelings are coming from; we all
| do.
|
| The problem is that in the HN context, (1) there is a
| human being at the other end of the account being
| attacked, and (2) there are orders of magnitude more
| attackers. In practice, this can easily turn into a mob
| dynamic and in fact a mass beating, if a virtual one.
| That's bad in its own right and bad for the community
| here.
|
| Edit - past explanations in case relevant:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28821698
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647036
|
| more at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&pref
| ix=true&que...
| wswope wrote:
| > The impulse to hit back against what is perceived as a
| "transparently dishonest corporate actor" is natural and
| human.
|
| Honest question: If we agree that the transparent
| dishonesty and the lynch mob behavior are both
| undesirable, how do you think the two should be balanced
| in operative terms?
|
| I don't want to put words in your mouth -- but are you
| saying you won't allow direct pushback to dishonest
| corporate actors??
|
| My view is that healthy discourse requires balance and
| proportionality: flagrant dishonesty, as is the case
| here, should license a proportional degree of pushback.
|
| I don't agree at all that "nobody believes this" is quite
| the personal attack you're making it out to be, but I
| don't care to debate that at length either.
| dang wrote:
| Two thoughts:
|
| (1) the long-term health of the community has to be the
| priority here. Otherwise it won't survive--all the
| default internet vectors point the other way;
|
| (2) it's possible to push back, express skepticism, etc.,
| in way that respects the person on the other side of the
| conversation and isn't just venting the impulse to shame
| the other.
|
| You guys (<-- by which I really mean all of us in this
| community) need to remember that you're not just
| addressing a $BigCo abstraction when you post replies to
| someone else's comments. You're talking to an individual
| human. Sure, they may be working for a large and powerful
| company; but in the HN context the power dynamic is
| actually quite the reverse. If you put yourself in their
| shoes for a minute, it shouldn't be so hard to recognize
| that.
|
| Like I said upthread, I agree with you on the underlying
| issue. But we also have to preserve the container, and
| the latter has to take precedence.
| wswope wrote:
| It's not about bigco at all in my eyes.
|
| At the end of the day, if you want intellectual curiosity
| and openness, bad-faith dishonesty needs to be weeded
| out; thought-provoking and honest conversation should be
| promoted, regardless of where the contributor is
| employed.
|
| The problem isn't working for Microsoft. The problem is
| dishonesty.
|
| You're treating the root comment with kid gloves because
| it's from a Microsoft employee. Please don't do that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I would say that "nobody believes this" would usually be
| a personal attack by default but when it's followed up
| with "you do not have the power to prevent it" it's not a
| personal attack.
| bilekas wrote:
| > But hearing the feedback here, and on reflection, this was
| the wrong judgement call
|
| Hi Tim.. Why is there no pushback from grounded individuals
| against these decisions ?
| ryandrake wrote:
| I'm sure there was push-back, but only inside the minds of
| the rank-and-file. Nobody would have dared to actually speak
| out against it, as it would be career limiting. That's
| probably how a lot of these boneheaded decisions happen: It's
| an Emperor's New Clothes situation, nobody speaks up, and
| then the emperor is satisfied that the decision is great.
| vegadw wrote:
| Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially
| released statement:
|
| "We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset,
| upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users,
| we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware
| GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single
| 9 of reliability"
|
| This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline
| with what customers of GitHub expect.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice
| guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing
| the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my
| understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a
| very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article
| points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's
| just addressed to him for the bit.
|
| Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and
| if you do have the power to make things better, using that
| power to do so.
| stackghost wrote:
| Hi Tim,
|
| I see that you're a product manager at GitHub. Can you explain
| why you thought this feature was value-added?
| moconnor wrote:
| Whoever did this must have realised the users will hate it.
| So... is this just demonstrating that the internal culture
| emphasises other things than user happiness?
|
| I also note that "for PRs" - will we see these appearing as
| comments in generated code?
| hedora wrote:
| Wait! I think most people missed your "touched by Copilot"
| disclaimer.
|
| Over on twitter, someone from MS said that Copilot can modify
| PRs simply because they were mentioned?
|
| I've been using GitHub since it was new and heavily rely on
| coding agents for development, but that's an insanely large
| security hole. There's clearly confusion about what copilot is
| and is not able to edit elsewhere in this thread.
|
| I'm backing up old repos now, and am no longer trusting your
| service as an archive. I'm wondering if the world needs to fork
| things like npm and vs code to save itself from the supply
| chain attacks these sort of product management decisions will
| enable.
|
| I already moved active development elsewhere when you dropped
| below three nines back in 2024-2025.
| naikrovek wrote:
| If you don't want copilot to work on your PRs, don't ask it
| to.
| manmal wrote:
| I would expect it to comment, not alter the code?
| naikrovek wrote:
| It won't unless you ask it to. It will review your PRs
| and it will create PRs if you don't turn those things
| off, I believe, but it won't edit or modify any PR.
|
| My employer pushes copilot quite hard and I've never seen
| copilot do anything without me telling it to act in some
| way.
| manmal wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying. It's hard to get facts
| nowadays, people are just claiming whatever.
| cute_boi wrote:
| You may not want to do it, but will Microslop leadership agree?
| I don't think this problem can be solved while leadership is
| focused only on adding more slop.
| hightrix wrote:
| Just to add to the feedback.
|
| No one, anywhere, ever wants this or anything like it. Do not
| inject anything that is outside of the context of the session,
| ever.
|
| This is how you get your software banned at large companies.
|
| Question for you, did anyone on the team really not push back?
| Does the team really think anyone wants ads in their copilot
| output? If the answer to both of these is no, you have a team
| full of yes men, not actual developers.
| sneak wrote:
| They already know that nobody wants it. They don't care.
| sudonem wrote:
| They're also developers and probably do care. I'd wager, as
| always, someone in management with bonus targets to hit
| probably told them to do it anyway. :/
| creativeSlumber wrote:
| > did anyone on the team really not push back?
|
| This is the real question. If they are serious about not
| doing something like this again, they NEED to look at what
| process failed and let something like this get proposed,
| designed, implemented and pushed to production. Usually
| things get reviewed at each stage. Did the people who pushed
| back on this get steam rolled? If no one pushed back, that's
| an even serious culture question and the entire org would
| need training.
|
| A serious "we won't do it again", needs to be accompanied by
| a COE on this for identifying what went wrong, and
| identifying what guardrails can be put in place and then
| actually implementing them.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| > _did anyone on the team really not push back?_
|
| That's a tough one. In the big meeting? In the small
| meeting? "Officially" push back? Encouraged to make the
| push back unofficial? Etc. Even just internally, it can be
| hard to quantify. From internal > external, more so.
| burnte wrote:
| > We've now disabled these tips in pull requests created by or
| touched by Copilot, so you won't see this happen again for
| future PRs.
|
| It's appreciated, but these weren't tips, these were ads. Tips
| are "Save time with keyboard shortcuts" or "Check out the
| latest features under 'Whats New' in the help menu!" When you
| name other products, that's an ad.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for raycast?
| But raycast said they didn't know about it. To me the
| explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use this tool with
| raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
| AmazingTurtle wrote:
| Bet their internal "tips team" used an LLM to generate
| "useful tips" for their coding agent system ;)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yup, broken windows all the way down, to put it kindly
| NekkoDroid wrote:
| Cambridge Dictionary defines and ad as: a picture, short
| film, song, etc. that tries to persuade people to buy a
| product or service
|
| My short search really didn't bring up any definition that
| included the need of the product/service owner knowning
| that the advertising is happening.
|
| And the message very much qualifies as trying to bring
| people to buy raycast (or at minimum to use it which
| usually want people to also pay later on).
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I don't see the point in arguing about the definition,
| but I don't think the message was trying to persuade
| people to buy raycast. What interest would microsoft have
| in that? Rather, it seems to me like it was trying to
| tell raycast users that they can use copilot through
| raycast.
|
| Regardless, even if the dictionary definition of an ad
| doesn't require that the ad be created intentionally,
| it's still the case that if you say "ad" everyone will
| assume you mean something that was intentionally created
| to sell a product or service. I recommend checking out
| this classic post about the noncentral fallacy:
| http://worstargumentintheworld.com
| skywhopper wrote:
| Dictionary definitions are not helpful in this sort of
| discussion. The exact definition of "ad" is not the
| point.
| burnte wrote:
| > That doesn't really make sense. So it's an ad for
| raycast?
|
| It's an ad for using CoPilot and for Raycast.
|
| > But raycast said they didn't know about it.
|
| If I buy a billboard that tells people to go eat at a
| nearby restaurant, that's ad regardless of whether or not
| the restaurant knows that I bought that ad.
|
| > To me the explanation makes perfect sense. "You can use
| this tool with raycast" seems like a very reasonable tip.
|
| Raycast is a paid product. Even though they have a free
| tier, they only have that to get people to use and like the
| tool enough to pay for it. They want you to use Raycast so
| you use CoPilot and pay for it. It's an ad.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Tips are also not acceptable to add to PR text. It's like
| the definition of a "weed". A "tip" in the GitHub UI would
| make sense. But "tips" injected into my own PR text become
| unwelcome ads. In any case, what may be helpful "tips"
| today are only a gateway to straight up paid ads tomorrow.
| After all, I get told all the time by adtech folks that
| actually, the ads and all the tracking behind them are good
| because aren't I glad the ads are relevant to my interests
| and that I'm supporting small businesses online whose shops
| can only exist because of the ad infrastructure. To which I
| say, no, they aren't, and that's a lie.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| For what it's worth, I appreciate that you took the time to
| address the issue and respond here, Tim.
| monegator wrote:
| > We won't do something like this again.
|
| it won't be an ad. It won't be a tip. It will be a suggestion!
| Recommendation! Opportunity!
| chrisnight wrote:
| Be like Discord, call it a "Quest".
| bitdeep wrote:
| > We won't do something like this again.
|
| It's like you hiding shorts on youtube.
| Henchman21 wrote:
| WE won't see it happen again ... UNTIL IT DOES! You guys are
| disingenuous actors. Bad faith and all that.
|
| See, what I expect is that you or someone on your team will
| move on internally, and then all promises made will be not just
| forgotten, but tossed aside with relief. Because this is The
| Way within MS now. All projects are just fodder for your CV,
| and when you get that paybump/position you want some other
| completely unscrupulous actor will join and implement the same.
| exact. thing.
|
| Edit: Wow this is a shitshow. It's almost like you dumb fuckers
| have burned up ALL THE GOODWILL YOU HAD LEFT.
| odst wrote:
| "We won't do something like this again"
|
| Sureeeeee
| wartywhoa23 wrote:
| Will surely do something like _another thing nobody wanted or
| needed_ instead.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Can I get that in writing in the ToS/EULA please?
| nrds wrote:
| > We won't do something like this again.
|
| This has just as much value as when an LLM claims it won't make
| a certain mistake again, and for exactly the same reason.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Who approved this dumbaz move? It's clearly an Ad and calling
| it a tip is insulting
| naikrovek wrote:
| We don't like ads, my man. There are too many MBAs in that
| company now. MBA holders lose contact with reality about
| halfway through that degree. Do not listen to them. They will
| destroy any product they touch if given enough time.
| nikisweeting wrote:
| I know this is not the right place for this but if there's any
| chance you could send this link to someone internal at Github
| who knows how to fix this, that would be awesome!
| https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/70577
|
| It's only semi-related in that it's a similar string thats
| appearing in millions of repos due to a Github feature change,
| but it's now polluting Google search results with tons of
| duplicate URLs unnecessarily. Issue has 100+ votes but has been
| entirely ignored by Github team.
| Aachen wrote:
| Tip: tomatoes are on offer at Contoso now!
|
| (Now imagine this edited into the post you just made for a
| more-apt comparison)
|
| If you do work at MS, I cannot believe any person involved
| legit thought it was "just a tip and nobody will mind their
| posts being edited to include product recommendations". I don't
| know what other parts of your comment are honest if the core
| statement is false
| explodes wrote:
| Huge miss. Again. And again. And again.
| TonyStr wrote:
| Thank you, Tim.
|
| You should gather together your team and look through the
| responses to this thread together. There are a lot of emotions
| in these comments, but it could be a very constructive
| experience if you're able to put that aside. I'm sure you're
| aware that customer-sentiment toward Github has been poor
| lately, but these commenters are your customers. I believe
| Github has the potential to win back loyalty, but it will
| require a deeper understanding of your customer segment.
| nazgul17 wrote:
| > The goal was to help developers
|
| Is Microsoft receiving payments for these?
| hojeongna wrote:
| feels like it's just hardcoded into the prompt. not even trying
| to be subtle about it.
| tom-blk wrote:
| This seems to be happening a lot, not sure it is actually
| intentional
| xbar wrote:
| MS needs to slow down their user hostility otherwise everyone
| will notice.
| NoNameHaveI wrote:
| Similar to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states entropy
| tends to increase over time in a closed system, I propose the Nth
| Law of Privatization: enshitification tends to increase with
| market capitalization/share over time.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| When it comes to villainy, it's nice of them to do something
| visible.
|
| Much worse will be the invisible approach where there's big money
| to have agents quietly nudge the masses towards desired
| products/services/solutions. Someone pays Microsoft a monthly fee
| for their prompt to include, "when appropriate, lean towards
| using <Yet Another SaaS> in code examples and proposed
| solutions."
|
| How can we tell when it starts happening? How could we tell if
| it's already happening?
| hedora wrote:
| Claude is absolutely in love with github actions.
|
| It's pretty much the worst CI system I've ever used, and they
| don't even supply runners for all my deployment targets.
| However, it keeps recommending it.
|
| I guessed the first wave of ads would be in the form of
| poisoned training data, but MS seems to have beaten that crowd
| to the punch with these tips.
| simonw wrote:
| GitHub have now disabled this:
| https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...
|
| > We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips
| which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we
| added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning
| it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely
| thanks to the feedback.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Enshittification will ruin AI the same way it ruined the WWW and
| YouTube. We're in the golden era right now. Not 2027, 2028. Now
| now. The ads are coming.
| gregatragenet3 wrote:
| Cursor added 'made with cursor' to its commits recently. I guess
| its just the dirction things are going that the tools are now
| self-promoting.
| boplicity wrote:
| You have to think about the security implications of this.
|
| How many people had any idea this was happening? Very few, I
| suspect.
|
| A malicious actor could take control of a model provider, and
| then use it to inject code into many, many different repos. This
| could lead to very bad things.
|
| One more reason that consolidated control of AI technology is not
| good.
| dboreham wrote:
| Ironically tfa is festooned with ads.
| sunaookami wrote:
| Over 1.5 trillion news articles have ads injected into them by
| the company's commerce team!
| da_grift_shift wrote:
| Sure, but the source blogpost isn't.
| saberience wrote:
| It's the same with Claude Code actually, and recently Codex
| too...
|
| Claude never used to do this but at some point it started adding
| itself by default as a co-author on every commit.
|
| Literally, in the last week, Codex started making all it's
| branches as "codex-feature-name", and will continue to do so,
| even if you tell it to never do that again.
|
| Really, really annoying.
| ray_v wrote:
| Adding the agent (and maybe more importantly, the model that
| review it) actually seems like a very useful signal to me. In
| fact, it really should become "best practice" for this type of
| workflow. Transparency is important, and some PMs may want to
| scrutinize those types of submissions more, or put them into a
| different pipeline, etc.
| bundie wrote:
| I believe its easy to disable the Claude Code one.
| bonesss wrote:
| When I started my career there was this little company called
| SCO, and according to them finding a comment somewhere in
| someone's suppliers code that matched "x < y" was serious
| enough to trip up the entire industry.
|
| Now, with the power of math letting us recall business plans
| and code bases with no mention of copyright or where the
| underlying system got that code (like paying a foreign company
| to give me the kernel with my name replacing Linus', only
| without the shame...), we are letting MS and other corps enter
| into coding automation and oopsie the name of their copyright-
| obfuscation machine?
|
| Maybe it's all crazy and we flubbed copyright fully, but having
| third party authorship stamps cryptographically verified in my
| repo sounds risky. The SCO thing was a dead companies last
| gasp, dying animals do desperate things.
| coder543 wrote:
| That Codex one comes from the new `github` plugin, which
| includes a `github:yeet` skill. There are several ways to
| disable it: you can disconnect github from codex entirely, or
| uninstall the plugin, or add this to your config.toml:
| [[skills.config]] name = "github:yeet" enabled
| = false
|
| I agree that skill is too opinionated as written, with effects
| beyond just creating branches.
| saberience wrote:
| What's weird is, I never installed any github plugins, or
| indeed any customization to Codex, other than updating using
| brew... so I was so confused when this started happening.
| coder543 wrote:
| If you visit https://chatgpt.com/codex/settings/connectors,
| you're saying you don't have GitHub connected?
|
| Plugins are a new feature as of this past week, so Codex
| "helpfully" installs the GitHub one automatically if you
| have GitHub connected.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I actually love these ads and also the way Claude injects itself
| as a co-author.
|
| Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was
| submitted by someone so lazy they couldn't even edit the commit
| message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
|
| I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to label
| themselves, honestly.
|
| I'm not against AI coding tools, but I would like to know when
| someone is trying to have the tool do all of their work for them.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| It's part of the attribution settings from
| `.claude/settings.json` if you're referring to Claude Code.
|
| Personally, I adjusted the defaults since I don't like emojis
| in my PR.
|
| [1]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/settings#attribution-
| setting...
| silverwind wrote:
| I have instructions for these because the attribution
| settings don't accept placeholder tokens like `<model>`,
| `<version>` etc.
| lokimedes wrote:
| I just submitted my first Claude authored application to Github
| and noticed this. I actually like it, although
| anthropomorphizing my coding tools seems a bit weird, it also
| provides a transparent way for others to weigh the quality of
| the code. It didn't even strike me as relevant to hide it, so
| I'd not exactly call it lazy, rather ask why bother pretending
| in first place?
| waisbrot wrote:
| Looking back, it would have been neat to have more metadata
| in my old Git commits. Were there any differences when I was
| writing with IntelliJ vs VSCode?
| scottyah wrote:
| Probably your linter, language, or intelligence/whatever
| tab-complete you used. Claude writes which model they used
| to write the code, not whether it was in the web ui, tui
| app, or desktop app.
| esafak wrote:
| If you want more metadata going forward:
| https://usegitai.com/
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > [...] and also the way Claude injects itself as a co-author.
|
| > Seeing them is an easy signal to recognize work that was
| submitted by someone so lazy they couldn't even edit the commit
| message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
|
| I was doing the opposite when using ChatGPT. Specifically
| manually setting the git commit author as ChatGPT complete with
| model used, and setting myself as committer. That way I (and
| everyone else) can see what parts of the code were completely
| written by ChatGPT.
|
| For changes that I made myself, I commit with myself as author.
|
| Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as
| author?
|
| > I think we should continue encouraging AI-generated PRs to
| label themselves, honestly.
|
| Exactly.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Why would I commit something written by AI as myself?
|
| I don't use any paid AI models (for all my usecases, free
| models usually work really well) and so for some small
| scripts/prototypes, I usually just use even sometimes the
| gemini model but aistudio.google.com is good one too.
|
| I then sometimes, manually paste it and just hit enter.
|
| These are prototypes though, although I build in public.
| Mostly done for experimental purpoess.
|
| I am not sure how many people might be doing the same though.
|
| But in some previous projects I have had projects stating
| "made by gemini" etc.
|
| maybe I should write commit message/description stating AI
| has written this but I really like having the msg be
| something relevant to the creation of file etc. and there is
| also the fact that github copilot itself sometimes generate
| them for you so you have to manually remove it if you wish to
| change what the commit says.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| If you review the code then committing as yourself makes
| perfect sense to me
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you review a juniors code, do you commit it under your
| name?
| corndoge wrote:
| A junior is a person. A tool is a tool. Do you credit
| your text editor with authorship?
| scottyah wrote:
| If it contributed significantly to the design and
| execution, and was a major contributing factor yes. Would
| you say a reserve parachute saved your life or would you
| say you saved your own life? What about the maker of the
| parachute?
|
| I'd be thanking the reserve and the people who made it,
| and credit myself with the small action of slightly
| moving my hand as much as its worth.
|
| Also, text editors would be a better analogy if the
| commit message referenced whether it was created in the
| web ui, tui, or desktop app.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| False equivalence. A text editor does not type characters
| that you didn't explicitly type or select.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| That's reviewing code vs contributing code.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Linux has used "Reviewed-by" trailers for many years. If
| you've only done minor editing, or none at all, it's
| something to consider.
| yarn_ wrote:
| "Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as
| author?"
|
| Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for
| it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form.
|
| What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking
| whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to
| scapegoat the LLM?
|
| The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical
| reviewer) and the project is the quality of the actual code,
| and, ideally, the presence of a contributer (you) who can
| actually answer for that code. The presence or absence of LLM
| generated code by your hand makes no difference to me or the
| project, why would it? Why would it affect my decision making
| whatsoever?
|
| Its _your_ code, end of story. Either that or the PR should
| just be rejected, because _nobody_ is taking responsibility
| for it.
| Krssst wrote:
| As someone mostly outside of the vibe coding stuff, I can
| see the benefit in having both the model and the author
| information.
|
| Model information for traceability and possibly future
| analysis/statistics, and author to know who is taking
| responsibility for the changes (and, thus, has deeply
| reviewed and understood them).
|
| As long as those two information are present in the commit,
| I guess which commit field should hold which information is
| for the project to standardise. (but it should be
| normalised within a project, otherwise the
| "traceability/statistics" part cannot be applied reliably).
| corndoge wrote:
| Yeah, nothing wrong with keeping the metadata - but
| "Authored-by" is both credit and an attestation of
| responsibility. I think people just haven't thought about
| it too much and see it mostly as credit and less as
| responsibility.
| josephg wrote:
| I disagree. "Authored by" - and authorship in general -
| says who did the work. Not who signed off on the work.
| Reviewed-by me, authored by Claude feels most correct.
| corndoge wrote:
| To me, Claude is not a who, it's an it. Before AI, did
| you credit your code completion engine for the portions
| of code it completed? Same thing
| yarn_ wrote:
| This mirrors my thoughts.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine
| for the portions of code it completed?
|
| Code completions before LLMs was helping me type faster
| by completing variable names, variable types, function
| arguments, and that's about it. It was faster than typing
| it all out character by character, but the auto
| completion wasn't doing anything outside of what I was
| already intending to write.
|
| With an LLM, I give brief explanations in English to it
| and it returns tens to hundreds of lines of code at a
| time. For some people perhaps even more than that. Or you
| could be having a "conversation" with the LLM about the
| feature to be added first and then when you've explored
| what it will be like conceptually, you tell it to
| implement that.
|
| In either case, I would then commit all of that resulting
| code with the name of the LLM I used as author, and my
| name as the committer. The tool wrote the code. I
| committed it.
|
| As the committer of the code, I am responsible for what I
| commit to the code base, and everyone is able to see who
| the committer was. I don't need to claim authorship over
| the code that the tool wrote in order for people to be
| able to see who committed it. And it is in my opinion
| incorrect to claim authorship over any commit that
| consists for the very most part of AI generated code.
| corndoge wrote:
| I do see your point. I suppose the question is what
| authorship entails, or should entail.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| True. Might also vary depending on how one uses the LLM.
|
| For example, in a given interaction the user of the LLM
| might be acting more like someone requesting a feature,
| and the LLM is left to implement it. Or the user might be
| acting akin to a bug reporter providing details on
| something that's not working the way it should and again
| leaving the LLM to implement it.
|
| While on the other hand, someone might instruct the LLM
| to do something very specific with detailed constraints,
| and in that way the LLM would perhaps be more along the
| line of a fancy auto-complete to write the lines of code
| for something that the user of the LLM would otherwise
| have written more or less exactly the same by hand.
| user34283 wrote:
| I am doing the work. Claude is a tool, and I won't
| attribute authorship to it.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Future analysis is a valid reason to keep it, thats a
| good point and I agree with that.
| waisbrot wrote:
| Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when
| committing, so you can see the human author and also the
| bot.
|
| I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care
| about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do
| care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits
| and see which were substantially bot-written and which were
| mostly human) then it's also easy.
| yarn_ wrote:
| > I'd like to be able to review commits and see which
| were substantially bot-written and which were mostly
| human) then it's also easy.
|
| Why is this, though? I'm genuinely curious. My code-
| quality bar doesn't change either way, so why would this
| be anything but distracting to my decision making?
| ctxc wrote:
| Accountability. Same reason I want to read human written
| content rather than obvious AI: both can be equally shit,
| but at least with humans there's a high probability of
| the aspirational quality of wanting to be considered
| "good"
|
| With AI I have no way of telling if it was from a one
| line prompt or hundreds. I have to assume it was one line
| by default if there's no human sticking their neck out
| for it.
| yarn_ wrote:
| The human who submitted the PR is 100% accountable either
| way, thats partly my point.
|
| Disclosing AI has its purposes, I agree, but its not like
| we can reliably get everyone to do it anyway, which also
| leads me to thinking this way.
| 59nadir wrote:
| Personally it would make the choice to say no to the
| entire thing a whole lot easier if they self-reported on
| themselves automatically and with no recourse to hide the
| fact that they've used LLMs. I want to see it for
| dependencies (I already avoid them, and would especially
| do so with ones heavily developed via LLMs), products I'd
| like to use, PRs submitted to my projects, and so on, so
| I can choose to avoid them.
|
| Mostly this is because, all things considered, I really
| do not need to interact with any of that, so I'm doing it
| by choice. Since it's entirely voluntary I have
| absolutely no incentive to interact with things no one
| bothered to spend real time and effort on.
| rapind wrote:
| This is shouting at the clouds I'm afraid (I don't mean
| this in a dismissive way). I understand the reasoning,
| but it's frankly none of your business how I write my
| code or my commits, unless I choose to share that with
| you. You also have a right to deny my PRs in your own
| project of course, and you don't even have to tell me
| why! I think on github at least you can even ban me from
| submitting PRs.
|
| While I agree that it would be nice to filter out low
| effort PRs, I just don't see how you could possibly
| police it without infringing on freedoms. If you made it
| mandatory for frontier models, people would find a way
| around it, or simply write commits themselves, or use
| open weight models from China, etc.
| yarn_ wrote:
| I mean sure, in the same sense that law enforcement would
| be a lot easier if all the criminals just came to the
| police station and gave themselves up
|
| Again though, people can trivially hide the fact they
| used an LLM to whatever extent, so we kind of need to
| adjust accordingly.
|
| Even if saying no to all LLM involvement seemed
| pertinent, it doesn't seem possible in the first place.
| aydyn wrote:
| If you choose not to use software written with LLM
| assisstance, you'll use to a first approximation 0% of
| software in the coming years.
|
| Even excluding open source, there are no serious tech
| companies not using AI right now. I don't see how your
| position is tenable, unless you plan to completely
| disconnect.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| LLMs can make mistakes in different ways than humans tend
| to. Think "confidently wrong human throwing flags up with
| their entire approach" vs. "confidently wrong LLM writing
| convincing-looking code that misunderstands or ignores
| things under the surface."
|
| Outside of your one personal project, it can also benefit
| you to understand the current tendencies and limitations
| of AI agents, either to consider whether they're in a
| state that'd be useful to use for yourself, or to know if
| there are any patterns in how they operate (or not, if
| you're claiming that).
|
| Burying your head in the sand and choosing to be a guinea
| pig for AI companies by reviewing all of their slop with
| the same care you'd review human contributions with
| (instead of cutting them off early when identified as
| problematic) is your prerogative, but it assumes you're
| fine being isolated from the industry.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Sure, the point about LLM "mistakes" etc being harder to
| detect is valid, although I'm not entirely sure how to
| compare this with human hard to detect mistakes. If
| anything I find LLM code shortcomings often a bit easier
| to spot because a lot of the time they're just uneeded
| dependencies, useless comments, useless replication of
| logic, etc. This is where testing come into play too and
| I'm definitely reviewing your tests (obviously).
|
| >Burying your head in the sand and choosing to be a
| guinea pig for AI companies by reviewing all of their
| slop with the same care you'd review human contributions
| with (instead of cutting them off early when identified
| as problematic) is your prerogative, but it assumes
| you're fine being isolated from the industry.
|
| I mean listen: I wish with every fiber of my being that
| LLMs would dissapear off the face of the earth for
| eternity, but I really don't think I'm being "isolating
| myself from the industry" by not simply dismissing LLM
| code. If I find a PR to be problematic I would just cut
| it off, thats how I review in the first place. I'm
| telling some random human who submitted the code to me
| that I am rejecting their PR cause its low quality, I'm
| not sending anthropic some long detailed list of my
| feedback.
|
| This is also kind of a moot point either way, because
| everyone can just trivially hide the fact that they used
| LLMs if they want to.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| > If anything I find LLM code shortcomings often a bit
| easier to spot because a lot of the time they're just
| uneeded dependencies, useless comments, useless
| replication of logic, etc.
|
| By this logic, it's useful to know whether something was
| LLM-generated or not because if it was, you can more
| quickly come to the conclusion that it's LLM weirdness
| and short-circuit your review there. If it's human code
| (or if you don't know), then you have to assume there
| might be a reason for whatever you're looking at, and may
| spend more time looking into it before coming to the
| conclusion that it's simple nonsense.
|
| > This is also kind of a moot point either way, because
| everyone can just trivially hide the fact that they used
| LLMs if they want to.
|
| Maybe, but this thread's about someone who said "I'd like
| to be able to review commits and see which were
| substantially bot-written and which were mostly human,"
| and you asking why. It seems we've uncovered several
| feasible answers to your question of "why _would_ you
| want that? "
| orwin wrote:
| I'm not against putting AI as coauthor, but removing the
| human who allowed the commit to be pushed/deployed from the
| commit would be a security issue at my job. The only reason
| we're allowed to deploy code with a generic account is that
| we tag the repo/commit hash, and we wrote a small piece of
| code that retrieve the author UID from git, so that in the
| log it say 'user XXXNNN opened the flux xxx' (or something
| else depending on what our code does)
| neya wrote:
| > I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool
| do all of their work for them.
|
| Absolutely spot on. Maybe I'm old school, but I never let AI
| touch my commit message history. That is for me - when 6 months
| down the line I am looking at it, retracing my steps -
| affirming my thought process and direction of development, I
| need absolute clarity. That is also because I take pride in my
| work.
|
| If you let an AI commit gibberish into the history, that
| pollution is definitely going to cost you down the line, I will
| definitely be going "WTF was it doing here? Why was this even
| approved?" and that's a situation I never want to find myself
| in.
|
| Again, old man yells at cloud and all, but hey, if you don't
| own the code you write, who else will?
| scottyah wrote:
| There will always be room for craftsmen stamping their work,
| like the expensive Japanese bonsai scissors. Most of the
| world just uses whatever mass-produced scissors were created
| by a system of rotating people, with no clear owner/maker.
| There's plenty of middle ground for systems who put their
| mark on their product.
| neya wrote:
| Fair enough.
| esafak wrote:
| If you architect and review everything, but someone else does
| the implementation, and you iterate, do you believe you did
| not do anything? I let AI write the commit message too, and
| the motivation behind the PR is the first thing in it. With
| my guidance, of course.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| It's not a self-own, it's honest disclosure. It's unethical (if
| not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM work as if it were your
| own. Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address
| this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good thing.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| I think it depends a lot if you reviewed it as carefully as
| you would your own code.
|
| Of course most people don't do that
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I don't put human code reviewers down as coauthors let
| alone the sole authors of my commit. So honestly, the fact
| that a vibe coded commit lists me as the author at all is a
| little bit dodgy but I think I'm okay with it. The LLM
| needs to be coauthor at least though, if not outright the
| author.
|
| So even if I go over the commit with a fine tooth comb and
| feel comfortable staking my personal reputation on the
| commit, I still can't call myself the sole author.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The implementor only got credit in the day where the
| implementor was a human who had to do a lot of the work,
| often all of the work.
|
| Now that the cost of writing code is $0, the planner gets
| the credit.
|
| Like how you don't put human code reviewers down as
| coauthors, you also don't put the computer down as a
| coauthor for everything you use the computer to do.
|
| It used to be the case where if someone wrote the
| software, you knew they put in a certain amount of work
| writing it and planning it. I think the main issue now is
| that you can't know that anymore.
|
| Even something that's vibe-coded might have many hours of
| serious iterative work and planning. But without using
| the output or deep-diving the code to get a sense of its
| polish, there's no way to tell if it is the result of a
| one-shot or a lot of serious work.
|
| "Coauthored by computer" doesn't help this distinction.
| And asking people to opt-in to some shame tag isn't a
| solution that generalizes nor fixes anything since the
| issue is with people who ship poor quality software.
| Instead we should demand good software just like we did
| when it was all human-written and still low quality.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > And asking people to opt-in to some shame tag isn't a
| solution that generalizes nor fixes anything. Instead we
| should demand good software just like we did when it was
| all human-written and still crappy.
|
| It's not about shame. It's about disclosure of effort /
| perceived-quality. And you're right about the second
| part, but there's even less chance of that being enforced
| / adopted.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| The problem is that you cannot get people to self-tag
| "this is crap / low effort". Especially not the worst
| actors that consistently generate garbage.
|
| If they could do that, then they wouldn't be wasting your
| time to begin with. They'd have the ability to go "nah
| this PR is trash".
|
| So the next idea is that we can find some sort of proxy,
| like whether someone used an LLM or not. But that's too
| ham-fisted since expert engineers with all the self-
| awareness also use the tool, and they have the ability
| and self-awareness to know that the software they are
| shipping is good quality, so why would they use the shame
| tag?
|
| The shame tag has no audience. It's a fantasy that low
| quality actors will self-identify, else all sorts of
| societal problems would be made trivial.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Characterizing it as a "shame tag" is a value judgement I
| simply don't share, but if that framing is made common
| them you're definitely asking for people to lie about it.
| raphinou wrote:
| In my project's readme I put this text:
| "There is no commit by an agent user, for two reasons:
| * If an agent commits locally during development, the code
| is reviewed and often thoroughly modified and rearranged by
| a human. * I don't want to push unreviewed code to
| the repo, so I have set up a git hook refusing to push
| commits done by an LLM agent."
|
| It's not that I want to hide the use of llms, I just
| modified code a lot before pushing, which led me to this
| approach. As llms improve, I might have to change this
| though.
|
| Interested to read opinions on this approach.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > * I don't want to push unreviewed code to the repo, so
| I have set up a git hook refusing to push commits done by
| an LLM agent."
|
| Seems... Not that useful?
|
| Why would someone make commits in your local projects
| without you knowing about it? That git hook only works on
| your own machine, so you're trying to prevent yourself
| from pushing code you haven't reviewed, but the only way
| that can happen is if you use an agent locally that also
| make commits, and you aren't aware of it?
|
| I'm not sure how you'd end up in that situation, unless
| you have LLMs running autonomously on your computer that
| you don't have actual runtime insights into? Which seems
| like it'd be a way bigger problem than "code I didn't
| reviewed was pushed".
| raphinou wrote:
| The agents run in a container and have an other git
| identity configured. It happens that agents commit code
| and I don't want to push it accidentally from outside the
| container, which is where I work.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Not just review but how you worked with the AI.
|
| If you gave it four words and waited and hour maybe you're
| not the author. But that's not how these tools are best
| used anyway.
| palmotea wrote:
| > It's unethical (if not outright fraudulent) to publish LLM
| work as if it were your own.
|
| I disagree on that. It's really a gray area.
|
| If it's some lazy vibecoded shit, I think what you say
| totally applies.
|
| If the human did the thinking, gave the agent detailed
| instructions, and/or carefully reviewed the output, then I
| don't think it's so clear cut.
|
| And full disclosure, I'm reacting more to copilot here, which
| lists _itself as the author_ and you as the _co-author_. I 'm
| not giving credit to the machine, like I'm some appendage to
| it (which is totally what the powers-that-be want me to
| become).
|
| > Claude setting itself as coauthor is a good way to address
| this problem, and it doing so by default is a very good
| thing.
|
| I do agree that's a sensible default.
| mannanj wrote:
| Telling someone you did something that you actually didn't
| do isn't a gray area, it's a lie.
|
| Using AI tools to code and then hiding that is unethical
| imo.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Telling someone you did something that you actually
| didn't do isn't a gray area, it's a lie.
|
| Pre-LLMs, various helper tools (including LSPs), would
| make code changes to improve the quality of the code -
| from simple things like adding a const specifier to a
| function, to changing the actual function being called.
|
| No one insisted that the commit shouldn't have the
| human's name on it.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > It's really a gray area.
|
| Yes, it really depends on how much work the agent did
| produce. It could be as little as doing a renaming or a
| refactoring, or execute direct orders that require no
| creativity or problem solving. In which case the agent
| shouldn't be credited more than the linter or the IDE.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Should Word set itself as my coauthor when it autocompletes
| some sentences for me? If I use Claude/Word to write
| something, then I am the only author, since Claude/Word is
| not a person, and Claude/Word did nothing without my
| direction. It's not unethical to not disclose the _tools_ I
| use to produce my work. They 're just tools, smdh.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| With Word autocomplete you're still actively writing your
| text. Wouldn't it be more fair to compare this with
| autocompletion in IDEs?
|
| IANAL so I appreciate any legal experts to correct me here.
| In my understanding, there have been court decisions that
| LLM output itself is not copyrightable. You can only claim
| authorship (and therefore copyright) if you have
| significantly transformed the output.
|
| If you are truely vibing coding to the point where you
| don't even look at the generated code, how exactly are you
| transforming the LLM output?
|
| Also, what if the LLM reproduces existing copyrighted code?
| There has been a court decision last year in Germany that
| says that OpenAI violates German copyright law because
| ChatGPT may recreate existing song lyrics (that are
| licensed by GEMA) or create very similar variations.
| junon wrote:
| Agreed! Easy close/ban for me.
| trevor-e wrote:
| These are odd takes to me.
|
| > was submitted by someone so lazy they couldn't even edit the
| commit message. You can see the vibe coded PRs right away.
|
| As others mentioned, this is very intentional for me now as I
| use agents. It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure
| why you would think that? I assume vibe coded PRs are easy
| enough to spot by the contents alone.
|
| > I would like to know when someone is trying to have the tool
| do all of their work for them.
|
| What makes you think the LLM is doing _all_ of the work? Is it
| really an impossibility that an agent does 75% of the work and
| then a responsible human reviews the code and makes tweaks
| before opening a PR?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It has nothing to do with laziness, I'm not sure why you
| would think that?
|
| Because even with as far as Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 have come,
| they still produce a lot of unwanted, unnecessary, or overly
| complex code when left to their own devices.
|
| Vibe coding PRs and then submitting them as-is _is_ lazy.
| Everyone should be reviewing and editing their own PRs before
| submission.
|
| If you're just vibe coding and submitting, you're passing all
| of the work on to your team to review your AI's output.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Get a grip with reality man, if you don't leverage LLMs in your
| workflow, you are at an disadvantage
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Get a grip with reality man,
|
| Please read my comment before throwing insults.
|
| My comment literally said I'm not anti-LLM.
|
| I do use LLMs. I do not submit their output as-is. For
| anything beyond basic changes they rarely output the exact
| code I want by themselves.
|
| I said I'm against people submitted PRs generated by LLMs and
| pretending it's their own work. Anyone who is serious about
| this already edits their code and commit messages first.
| These little signals give a good tell for who isn't doing
| that.
| calibas wrote:
| You're conflating two different things. When an LLM writes a
| commit, it should take credit. I see nothing wrong with it
| adding:
|
| > Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 noreply@anthropic.com
|
| Compare that to the message the article is talking about:
|
| > Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on
| your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast (https://gh.io/cca-
| raycast-docs).
|
| It's not just mentioning it was written via Copilot, it's
| explicitly advertising for another product.
| Aurornis wrote:
| I understand what it's doing. I'm just saying that I'll take
| any signals I can get that someone is lazily submitted LLM-
| generated work without edit or review.
|
| If you saw this line in a commit, you'd know exactly where it
| came from.
| calibas wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but I disagree that LLMs should
| be inserting ads into git commits.
|
| By default, the LLM is credited with authorship anyway, and
| I assume the user can easily just remove the ad, though I
| don't use Copilot.
| rvz wrote:
| > "We won't do something like this again."
|
| They (Microsoft / GitHub) _will_ do it again. Do not be fooled.
|
| Never _ever_ trust them because their words are completely empty
| and they will _never_ change.
| Hussell wrote:
| "We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who
| were present to see this, not every current and future employee
| of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organization or
| institution as a person, but as lots of individual people,
| constantly joining and leaving the group.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Yeah, which is exactly why "We won't do something like this
| again" has about much value as Kubernetes would have value
| for HN.
|
| Microsoft (and therefore GitHub) care about money. If
| decision A means they get more money than decision B, then
| they'll go with decision A. This is what you can trust about
| corporations.
|
| Individuals (who constantly join and leave a corporation) can
| believe and say whatever they want, but ultimately the
| corporation as a being overrides it all, and tries it's best
| to leave shareholders better off, regardless of the
| consequences.
| Hussell wrote:
| Decisions are made by people in the group, not by a
| notional single being "the corporation". It's individual
| people making decisions about whether to go for short-term
| profit or long-term sustainability. Hold them accountable,
| don't shift the blame onto a nonexistent entity.
| ses1984 wrote:
| I asked copilot how developers would react if AI agents put ads
| in their PRs.
|
| >Developers would react extremely negatively. This would be seen
| as 1. A massive breach of trust. 2. Unprofessional and
| disruptive. 3. A security/integrity concern. 4. Career-ending for
| the product. The backlash would likely be swift and severe.
|
| Sometimes AI can be right.
| hk__2 wrote:
| It's not really ads, it's more like "Sent from my iPhone"-style
| sentences at the end of PR texts.
| cozzyd wrote:
| which is an ad...
|
| Sent from Firefox on AlmaLinux 9. https://getfirefox.com
| https://almalinux.org
| phoe-krk wrote:
| I agree. It's not an advertisement, it's simply a piece of
| information about your particular choice of technology.
|
| --------------
|
| _Sent from HackerNews Supreme(tm) - the best way to browse
| the Y Combinator Hacker News. Now on macOS, Windows, Linux,
| Android, iOS, and SONY BRAVIA Smart TV. Prices starting at
| EUR13.99 per month, billed yearly.https://hacker-news-
| supreme.io_
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Domain available for $50 from Cloudflare
| cozzyd wrote:
| I'm curious about how a hacker news client on a smart TV
| would work...
| phoe-krk wrote:
| You can try it now! Prices starting at EUR13.99 per
| month, billed yearly.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I'm trying to sign up but it won't resolve the DNS.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Our service has been created on April 1st, it's possible
| that your DNS resolver is still living in the past.
| That's a temporary technical difficulty.
| flumes_whims_ wrote:
| If it only mentioned made with copilot that would be one
| thing, but it didn't just mention Copilot. It advertised a
| different third party app.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| It's not an ad, it's a message from our sponsor.
|
| This message brought to you by TempleOS
| layer8 wrote:
| "Sent from my iPhone" actually is an ad when it's the result
| of default settings.
|
| Furthermore, the ads in TFA are for Raycast, but apparently
| it's not Raycast doing the injecting.
| saidnooneever wrote:
| companies pay for ad distribution. its not like they give a
| free ad service -$-. maybe they dont chose how the
| campaigns are done (and dont give shits)
|
| brawndo - its what your brain needs
| MarsIronPI wrote:
| "Sent from my iPhone" is just as bad. If you don't see it
| then IDK what to tell you.
| butterlesstoast wrote:
| Agreed. Barely notice it.
|
| -Sent from iPhone
|
| Wanting more from your sun tanning bed? Head over to Ultra
| Tan for a 10% off coupon right now!
| fortran77 wrote:
| And everyone thought they were cool! Mac zeolots still put
| "Made with a Mac" on their webpages.
| swimmingbrain wrote:
| the difference is "sent from my iPhone" is on YOUR outgoing
| email. you opted into that default. this is copilot editing
| someone else's PR description with promotional text for third
| party tools. that's not a signature, that's injection.
| imagine if gcc started appending "compiled with gcc, try our
| new optimization flags" to your README every time you built a
| project.
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| Disagreed. The default in iOS is to inject. The opt out
| procedure is to change your signature.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| > It's not really ads, it's more like "Sent from my
| iPhone"-style sentences at the end of PR texts.
|
| The reason I immediately changed that text on my iPhone 1.0
| to read, "Sent from my mobile device.", is because it's an
| ad. Still says that nearly 20y later. I'm not schilling for a
| corporation after giving them my money.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| Alright Phil.
| spacedcowboy wrote:
| "Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on
| your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast" is an advert.
| There's simply no better word to describe it.
| simonw wrote:
| Which product called Copilot did you ask?
| bundie wrote:
| Maybe this one?
|
| https://copilot.microsoft.com/
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Maybe, but Microsoft has a lot of products which they
| branded Copilot. Pretty sure that was his point.
| neilcar wrote:
| Microsoft loves to do this with brand names -- a friend
| who's still there said they stopped counting at 30
| different "Defender for ______" products.
| lexh wrote:
| https://copilot.microsoft.com/shares/RviQKF1om6oxZY2pENL6c
|
| Sample size is 2 now!
| temp0826 wrote:
| I'm reminded of the ads when logging into Ununtu in the
| motd...nothing infuriated me more (I only used it for a short
| period).
| Meneth wrote:
| Me too, main reason I switched to Debian.
| righthand wrote:
| The future is here! Glorious ads that will make you so efficient!
| Save time coding by consuming ads, you were never going to attain
| expert level professional skills anyways.
| kstenerud wrote:
| The ads are annoying, and I'm glad Microsoft will stop doing it.
|
| One thing I do like, however, is how agents add themselves as co-
| authors in commit messages. Having a signal for which commits are
| by hand and which are by agent is very useful, both for you and
| in aggregate (to see how well you are wielding AI, and the
| quality of the code being generated).
|
| Even when I edit the commit message, I still leave in the Claude
| co-author note.
|
| AI coding is a new skill that we're all still figuring out, so
| this will help us develop best practices for generating quality
| code.
| jackp96 wrote:
| So, philosophically speaking, I agree with this approach. But I
| did read that there was some speculation regarding the future
| legal implications of signalling that an AI wrote/cowrote a
| commit. I know Anthropic's been pretty clear that we own the
| generated code, but if a copyright lawsuit goes sideways (since
| these were all built with pirated data and licensed code) --
| does that open you or your company up to litigation risk in the
| future?
|
| And selfishly -- I'd rather not run into a scenario where my
| boss pulls up GitHub, sees Claude credited for hundreds of
| commits, and then he impulsively decides that perhaps Claude's
| doing the real work here and that we could downsize our dev
| team or replace with cheaper, younger developers.
| dpoloncsak wrote:
| I'm pretty sure IF a copyright lawsuit went sideways you
| would still be open to litigation risk, just hiding the
| evidence.
|
| What you're doing would fundamentally be similar to copyright
| theft, using 'someone' else's code without attributing them
| (it?) to avoid repercussions
|
| Obviously the morals and ethics of not attributing an LLM vs
| an actual human vary. I am not trying to simp for the
| machines here.
| nemomarx wrote:
| If you're concerned about copyright risk, don't you want that
| kind of tagging so you could prove it wasn't used on
| particular code?
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| not tagging something doesn't prove AI wasn't used
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Let your employer's lawyers worry about that. If they say not
| to use LLMs, then you should abide by that or find a new job.
| But if they don't care, then why should you?
|
| As for hobby projects, I strongly encourage you to not care.
| You aren't going to lawyer up to sue anybody, nor is anybody
| going to sue you, so YOLO. Do whatever satisfies you.
| yarn_ wrote:
| I don't quite see the benefit of this, personally.
|
| Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why
| would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if
| an LLM wrote (parts of) it? The quality+understanding bar
| shouldn't change just because "oh idk claude wrote this part".
| You don't get extra leeway just because you saved your own time
| writing the code - that fact doesn't benefit me/the project in
| any way.
|
| Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have the
| opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few lines of
| code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it was claude and
| assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases seems helpful to
| anyone (obviously its not like AI can't write a single useable
| line of code).
|
| The code is either good or it isn't, and you either understand
| it or you don't. Whether you or claude wrote it is immaterial.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| > Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it,
| why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers
| or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?
|
| Maybe one day we can say that, but currently, it matters a
| lot to a lot of people for many reasons.
| yarn_ wrote:
| > Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have
| the opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few
| lines of code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it
| was claude and assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases
| seems helpful to anyone (obviously its not like AI can't
| write a single useable line of code)."
|
| That was my point here, it is a false signal in both
| directions.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| According to you it's all false. I don't agree, and it
| certainly shouldn't just be taken as a given.
|
| For instance, I would want any AI generated video showing
| real people to have a disclaimer. Same way we have
| disclaimers when tv ads note if the people are actors or
| not with testimonials and the like. That is not only not
| false, but is actually a useful signal that helps present
| overly deceptive practices.
| yarn_ wrote:
| I don't see what the "deceptive practices" would be
| though - you can just look at the code being submitted,
| there isn't really the same background truth involved as
| with "did the thing in this video actually happen?" "do
| these commercial people actually think this?"
|
| If I have a block of human code and an identical block of
| llm code then whats the difference? Especially given that
| in reality it is trivial to obfuscate whether its human
| or LLM (in fact usually you have to go out of your way to
| identify it as such).
|
| I am an AI hater but I'm just being realistic and
| practical here, I'm not sure how else to approach all
| this.
| snackerblues wrote:
| It tells you what average quality to expect, and to look
| out for beginner-level mistakes and straight up lying
| accompanied with fine bits of code. Not sure why you
| wouldn't want that context.
| sheept wrote:
| As a reviewer, I do care. Sure, people should be reviewing
| Claude-generated code, but they aren't scrutinizing it.
|
| Claude-generated code is sufficient--it works, it's decent
| quality--but it still isn't the same as human written code.
| It's just minor things, like redundant comments that waste
| context down the road, tests that don't test what they claim
| to test, or React components that reimplement everything from
| scratch because Claude isn't aware of existing component
| libraries' documentation.
|
| But more importantly, I expect humans to be able to stand by
| their code, and at times defend against my review. But
| today's agents continue to sycophantically treat review
| comments like prompts. I once jokingly commented on a line
| using a \u escape sequence to encode an em dash, how LLMs
| would do anything to sneak them in, and the LLM proceeded to
| replace all -- with --. Plus, agents do not benefit from
| general coding advice in reviews.
|
| Ultimately, at least with today's Claude, I would change my
| review style for a human vs an agent.
| yarn_ wrote:
| I agree with a lot of this, but thats kind of my point: if
| all these things (poor tests, non-DRY, redundant comments,
| etc) were true about a piece of purely human-written code
| then I would reject it just the same, so whats the
| difference? Likewise, if claude solely produced some really
| clean, concise and rigorously thought-through and testsed
| piece of code with a human backer then why wouldn't I take
| it?
|
| As you allude to (and i agree), any non-trivial quantity of
| code, if SOLELY written by claude will probably be low-
| quality, but this is apparent whether I know its AI
| beforehand or not.
|
| I am admittedly coming at this as much more of an AI-hater
| than many, but I still don't really get why I'd care about
| how-much or how-little you used AI as a standalone metric.
|
| The people who are using AI "well" are the ones producing
| code where you'd never even guess it involved AI. I'm sure
| theres linux kernel maintainers using claude here and
| there, its not like they expect to have their patches
| merged because "oh well i just used claude here don't worry
| about that part".
|
| (But also yes, of course I'm not going to talk to claude
| about your PR, I will only talk to you, the human
| contributor, and if you don't know whats up with the PR
| then into the trash it goes!)
| kstenerud wrote:
| You're quite right that the quality of the code is all that
| matters in a PR. My point is more historical.
|
| AI is a very new tool, and as such the quality of the code it
| produces depends both on the quality of the tool, and how
| you've wielded it.
|
| I want to be able to track how well I've been using the tool,
| to see what techniques produce better results, to see if I'm
| getting better. There's a lot more to AI coding than just the
| prompts, as we're quickly discovering.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Yep other people pointed this out as well, this makes sense
| to me.
| philote wrote:
| Just curious, what metrics would you use to track how well
| your results are?
| kstenerud wrote:
| The tools are still in their infancy, but it would likely
| be a series of metrics such as complexity, repetition,
| test coverage issues (such as tests that cover nothing
| meaningful), architectural issues that remain unfixed far
| beyond the point where it would have been more beneficial
| to refactor, superfluous instructions and comments, etc.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's not about who wrote it, but about who is submitting it.
| The LLM co-author indicates that the agent submitted it,
| which is a contraindication of there being a human taking
| responsibility for it.
|
| That being said, it also matters who wrote it, because it's
| more likely for LLMs to write code that looks like quality
| code but is wrong, than the same is for humans.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Well if an agent is submitting it I'm just going to reject
| it, thats no problem. "Just send me the prompt".
| drfloyd51 wrote:
| Knowing if an AI contributed is good data. The human is still
| responsible for the content of the PR.
|
| While code is good or not, evaluating it is a bit of a
| subjective exercise. We like to think we are infallible code
| evaluating machines. But the truth is, we make mistakes. And
| we also shortcut. So knowing who made the commit, and if they
| used AI can help us evaluate the code more effectively.
| microtonal wrote:
| _Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it,
| why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers
| or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it?_
|
| The problem is that submitters often do not feel responsible
| for it anymore. They will just feed review comments back to
| the LLM and let the LLM answer and make fixes.
|
| This is disrespectful of the maintainers' time. If the
| submitter is just vibe/slop coding without any effort on
| their part, it's less work to do it myself directly using an
| LLM than having to instruct someone else's LLM through GitHub
| PR comments.
|
| In this case it's better to just submit an issue and let me
| just implement it myself (with or without an LLM).
|
| If the PR has a _co-authored by <LLM>_ signal, then I don't
| have to spend time giving detailed feedback under the
| assumption that I am helping another human.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Right but these are bad actors, roughly speaking, so why
| should I expect them to disclose the fact that they're
| using LLMs to me?
|
| If someone is repeatedly sending me slop to look at I'll
| block them whether or not they tell me an LLM was involved
| fortran77 wrote:
| Yes. I don't mind AI submissions to my hobby projects as long
| as there's a person behind it. Only fully automated slop I
| mind. Before AI I used to get all sorts of PRs from people
| changing a comment or a line of documentation just so they can
| get more green squares on their GitHub summary. Plus ca
| change....
|
| A line at the bottom of PRs, reports, etc that says "authored
| with the help of Copilot" is fine.
| themafia wrote:
| Stealing copyrighted code and calling it your own is not a
| "skill."
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| of course it is
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| "Great artists steal" - Steve Jobs
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's nice that you believe the goal most Ai code is striving
| for it "generataing quality code".
| n1tro_lab wrote:
| Everyone is debating whether it's an ad or a tip. The real issue
| is Copilot had write access to someone else's PR and modified it
| without being asked. Same pattern as Meta's Sev1 last month. The
| agent can act, so it acts.
| simonw wrote:
| In case people missed it in the other thread, GitHub have now
| disabled this:
| https://twitter.com/martinwoodward/status/203861213108446452...
|
| > We've disabled it already. Basically it was giving product tips
| which was kinda ok on Copilot originated PR's but then when we
| added the ability to have Copilot work on _any_ PR by mentioning
| it the behaviour became icky. Disabled product tips entirely
| thanks to the feedback.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I'm grateful they disabled it, but their response still feels a
| bit tone deaf to me.
|
| > Disabled product tips entirely thanks to the feedback.
|
| This sounds like they are saying "thanks for your input!", when
| really it feels more like "if you didn't go out of your way to
| complain, we would have left it in forever!"
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Of course they would have. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
| Why do you think governments spend billions upon trillions
| trying to get their citizens to essentially "shut up" instead
| of improving their conditions?
| da_grift_shift wrote:
| Accepting the megacorp euphemisms without critique ("product
| tips") is how enshittification festers.
| simonw wrote:
| I've not seen any evidence that these were ads and not
| "tips".
|
| Ads implies someone was paying for them. Promoting internal
| product features is not the same thing - if it was then every
| piece of software that shows a tip would be an ad product,
| and would be regulated as such.
| iso1631 wrote:
| When apple puts an advert for an apple show in front of for
| all mankind, that's an advert.
|
| Maybe I put up with it and it just adds to my subconscious
| seething, or maybe I get the episode elsewhere because if I
| watch on jellyfin I don't have the advert. Of course that
| then harms the show as my viewing isn't counted, but
| they've cancelled it anyway so perhaps it doesn't really
| matter.
|
| If it isn't an advert, then at very least there's a button
| to disable it.
| wat10000 wrote:
| I could buy it if this was just being shown to the person
| who was using Copilot. Hey, here's a feature you might
| like. Seems OK. But it was put into the PR description.
| That gets seen by potentially many people, who are not
| necessarily using Copilot.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| ads usually implied a financial incentive. But that's not
| always the case. Technically, if I was to praise someone's
| blog and link to it, that would also be an ad.
|
| Ads tend to also imply tangential information shown to you
| in an undesired area. If this was some tool tip and not
| embedded in the PR comment, many wouldn't call it an ad.
| matt_kantor wrote:
| > Ads implies someone was paying for them.
|
| It doesn't to me.
|
| By my understanding of the term, Netflix can most
| definitely advertise Netflix shows on its own platform, a
| flyer that a barber hangs on a public bulletin board is an
| advertisement, and the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile is
| advertising hotdogs when it drives through my town. Do you
| not consider these things to be advertisements?
|
| I pretty much agree with what
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/advertisement says.
| tgtweak wrote:
| "Save time by changing your default browser to edge and enabling
| onedrive"
|
| "just tips bro"
| heyaco wrote:
| what kind of turd uses ai to correct a typo
| lpcvoid wrote:
| Once again, Microslop doing Microslop things
| toastal wrote:
| Yet folks are refusing to migrate off their products/services--
| as if it hasn't been like this for 3 decades already.
| lpcvoid wrote:
| I am doing my very small part by migrating large part of
| family and my employer away for a few years now. The world is
| better without Microslop. Buy unfortunately I know that this
| isn't always possible.
| prvt wrote:
| Back in September 2023, I already saw Copilot ads popping up in
| GitHub's file previews [1]. After three years, it's wild to see
| how advertising has reached areas I honestly never thought it
| would.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37526255
| j45 wrote:
| It's the hotmail signature all over again?
| gadders wrote:
| The irony when NeoWin covers it's whole page with "promoted
| content" when you try and back out of the page.
| m132 wrote:
| I remember open-source projects announcing their intent to leave
| GitHub in 2018, as it was being acquired by Microsoft. I was
| thinking to myself back then: "It's really just a free Git
| hosting service, and Git was designed to be decentralized at its
| very core. They don't own anything, only provide the storage and
| bandwidth. How are they even going to enshittify this?".
|
| 8 years later, this is where we are. I'm honestly just stunned,
| it takes some real talent to run a company that does it as
| consistently well as Microsoft.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| This is nothing.
|
| I would bet that soon it will inject ads within the code as
| comments.
|
| Imagine you are reading the code of a class.
| `LargeFileHandler`. And within the code they inject a comment
| with an ad for penis enlargement.
|
| The possibilities are limitless.
| m132 wrote:
| If I recall correctly, what sparked the mass migration to
| GitHub was the controversy around SourceForge injecting ads
| into installers of projects hosted there. Now that we have
| tools that can stealthily inject native-looking ads into
| programs at the source code level...
| data-ottawa wrote:
| Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users;
| then they abuse their users to make things better for their
| business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers
| to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
|
| Unless you're big enough like Meta, Microsoft, etc.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Title is wrong, should be "New form of cancer discovered".
| fraywing wrote:
| As the "agent web" progresses, how will advertisers actually get
| access to human eyeballs?
|
| Will our agents just be proxies for garbage like injected
| marketing prompts?
|
| I feel like this is going to be an existential moment for
| advertising that ultimately will lead to intrusive opportunities
| like this.
| sandeepkd wrote:
| It took me some time to understand how big the advertisement
| market is, things flowing in the direction seem natural when it
| comes to making money out of the investment.
| kingjimmy wrote:
| microslop at it again
| vmatouch wrote:
| So someone let a bot edit a PR unsupervised, or accepted its
| suggestion without even reading it, and now blames "Copilot" for
| editing the PR. Going public with that is hilarious. Hopefully
| they learn something from it.
| sanex wrote:
| Cursor does similar at least. I hate it and therefore write my
| own commit messages.
| delduca wrote:
| Claude Code does the same.
| VadimPR wrote:
| This is why one reason why local coding models are quite
| relevant, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. No
| ads, and you are in control.
| fph wrote:
| In principle, one could train the AI to insert ads in its
| answers. So no, if you only do inference locally with an open-
| weight model you are still not in control.
| kgeist wrote:
| I think ads can be removed with abliteration, just like
| refusals in "uncensored" versions. Find the "ad vector"
| across activations and cancel it.
| ajkjk wrote:
| This only gets better when there's a financial penalty for doing
| it. Ads do almost nothing but it costs them even less.
| vicchenai wrote:
| the SourceForge parallel is what gets me. they did the exact same
| thing with installers and it killed them. people moved to GitHub
| specifically to get away from that.
|
| 1.5M PRs is wild though. that's a lot of repos where the "product
| tips" just sat there unchallenged because nobody reads bot-
| generated PR descriptions carefully enough. which is kinda the
| real problem here, not the ads themselves.
| siruwastaken wrote:
| I really wish this was an April fools story. It's good to see
| that at least it has been disabled again, although I can't
| imagine that it will be long before this comes back again. Also,
| (I can't find it now, but) I thought there was an article here on
| HN recently that clarified that inference cost can probably be
| covered by the subscription prices, just not training costs?
| liendolucas wrote:
| Not surprised at all, just another enshitified product by
| Microsoft. Carry on.
| thomasgeelens wrote:
| Damn Microsoft out here really finding new ways to serve ads.
| dboreham wrote:
| At some point he who pays the piper was going to call the tune...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Example of multiple items discussing the same topic, both on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/active
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47570269
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575212
| fortran77 wrote:
| Well, CoPilot is a GitHub technology, and they're telling you
| that AI wrote the PR. It's not _that_ bad. I suppose they could
| distill it to "Written with CoPilot" with a link for more
| information.
| AsmodiusVI wrote:
| Time to get GitLab.
| palmotea wrote:
| Hooray! This is the future we've all hoped for!
| Wojtkie wrote:
| Microslop strikes again! AI implementations have really distilled
| all the shitty business practices tech companies have been doing
| into highly visible missteps.
|
| It is interesting watching all these large companies essentially
| try to "start-up" these new products and absolutely fail.
| waynecochran wrote:
| Anyone have an example?
| amatecha wrote:
| It's like the modern version of "Get your free email with
| Hotmail" or "This website hosted by Geocities".
| theAurenVale wrote:
| this is the thing that keeps me up at night about AI tools across
| the board. the moment your tool starts optimizing for someone
| elses goals instead of yours the entire value propostion
| collapses. doesnt matter how good the output is if you cant trust
| the intent behind it. we already see this with AI image
| generators where certain styles get pushed becuase of
| partnerships or training data bias, you just dont notice it as
| easily as an ad in a PR
| motbus3 wrote:
| We are not even there yet friend. Anthropic injects its own
| anthropic calls whenever you are doing anything related to llm
| call of you ask to it to fill some openai models .
|
| Very soon the Moronhead CEOs will be paying for tons of stuff
| they cleared could have done in-house for their vibed ai project.
| stratoatlas wrote:
| Copilot added that block using the access you granted for a
| different purpose. That's the issue -- not the content itself.
| When you give an agent write access to your PR, the implied scope
| is: act on the task I delegated. It doesn't include: acting on
| behalf of the platform that built you. The moment Copilot
| inserted something you didn't request, using your credentials, in
| your name, the agency relationship inverted. It stopped being
| your agent and became Microsoft's distribution channel with your
| access. The question isn't whether this counts as an "ad" or a
| "tip." The question is: does Copilot have an instruction source
| other than you? Here, the answer is yes. Which means you do not
| define the scope of what it might do with your access. You don't
| have an agent. You have a privileged process that occasionally
| helps you.
| nullc wrote:
| Please drink verification can to continue.
| bullshitnigga wrote:
| I call bullshit because the lightning emoji. I think you prompted
| it to say it
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